[The Word-formatted Summary is found here.]
“It had never previously been understood why the Northerner word for ‘unavoidable danger’ literally translated as ‘blue fire mountain.’” – Loren Kenither, BoS

 

"“More are
men’s ends mark’d than their lives before.

The setting
sun, and music at the close,

As the last
taste of sweets, is sweetest last,

Writ in
remembrance more than things long past."

–William Shakespeare,
King Richard II

 

Events of 5 November 2005 in Charlotte, N.C. / 10-11 June 2192
B.Y.
in far western Cromwell, a place known as the Salt Sea Region

 

[the
same day as the events of the Eighth Telvar
Open]

 

[NOTE: Some of the diverse summaries of these
events contain contradictory information, and skewed perspectives based on the
experiences of the characters involved.
Some of these have been noted specifically, but otherwise the unique
perspectives of each group have been maintained. The truth
of each situation probably lies somewhere in the middle.]

 

We
begin as:

 

A corrupt and evil kingdom of slave lords collapses…

A city built on the edge of a large salty sea is in chaos…

And Cromwellian forces enter the region to restore order and
crush the slavers…

 

The ruins of an ancient Kraken temple molder…

A haunted forest in the shadow of an extinct volcano slumbers…

And a librarian at Cromwell’s famed Academy heads off on an
unusual vacation…

 

But
meanwhile:

 

A holy Paladin of Nevron receives a vision of great
importance…

One of the High Priests of Aurora hears a rumor of a city in
dire straits…

And the government of Cromwell realizes that there are several
“irregularities” in the librarian’s
preparations for his vacation, resulting in an Academy Team known as Death from Above being dispatched in
pursuit…

 

Events
begin to fall into place in the city, forest, and surrounding lands, as…

 

The city of Towlmere devolves into chaos and mayhem…

The servants of Aurora and Nevron converge on the area…

The Academy Team finds the trail of the errant librarian and is
in hot pursuit…

 

As the librarian completes his work on a strange device
at the top of an ancient pyramid in the midst of the haunted forest…

 

And
an ancient evil awakens…

 

Summary: Towlmere,
City on the Edge of Midnight.

 

Featuring:

Xavier, played by Jack McKechnie

Javin, henchman of Xavier, played by Ryan Snead

Towlmere community leader/politician, played by David Bjorlin

 

Xavier,
an Auroran evangelist and hero, has spent several years in Cromwell and the
Near Realm, working on behalf of his god and the people of the region. With friends and contacts in many places,
Xavier’s ear has been to the ground… and lately he has heard rumblings.

 

Upon
hearing of the collapse of a slave lord kingdom on the edge of Cromwell’s Salt
Sea Region, has traveled there to look for new worshippers for Aurora amongst
the recently freed slaves and see where his many skills might be put to
use. There is a large settlement on the
edge of the Cromwellian zone of control that seemed a likely place to look for
new worshippers of Aurora, the city of Towlmere. On a peninsula jutting into the large salty Sea, Towlmere was in chaos,
and Xavier had heard of the approach of lawful forces seeking to restore
order. His contacts in the Realmish
government had spoken with the people of importance in the Cromwellian
government and he knew that the advancing Cromwellian army should reach the
city in about six days.

 

Xavier
and his trusted henchman Javin [played by Ryan Snead] slipped into Towlmere
ahead of the approaching army with the thought of leading a movement within the
city to disrupt any defense mounted by the criminal leaders of the city, the
Slave Lords. Such a move would
establish Xavier as a hero to the local people and possibly lead to thousands
of conversions to Aurora in a city that seems destined to be populous and
weathly in the years ahead. Also,
Xavier could use his copious administrative and clerical skills to make things
more comfortable for the populace.

 

Xavier
arrived in Towlmere expecting to find the Slave Lords preparing a defense
against the approaching army—possibly forcing slaves and poor residents to fight
on their own behalf. Yet the city was a
mix of desolation and chaos. There were
about 30,000 persons still in the city, and no sign of the Slave Lords. The brutal guards that enforced their rule
were gone. The wealthy districts of the
city were largely empty, save for scattered looters. The docks were almost entirely devoid of boats, and the
warehouses stood open and barren. The citadel at the center of the city was
closed and dark. Xavier looked around
with an eye to taking some useful action.

 

As
Xavier wandered the city, he stumbled across a tavern-like building named
"The Clam House." It was
packed, but only one voice echoed out its open double doors. Inside he found many locals and a community
leader who had run some sort of an outreach in the slums for many years [played
by David Bjorlin]. He shared news of
the situation in the city with Xavier.

 

Apparently,
the Slave lords had left, taking everything of value they could take with
them. They had left a city of hungry
and abused people with nowhere to go—waiting and hoping for the arrival of the
Cromwellian army. He is now trying to
establish some sort of order in the city, to stem the crime and looting, to
unchain the abandoned slaves, and to bring food to a city that has no stores,
and almost no boats to resume fishing.
The few artisans that remained in the city fled as the Slave Lords left,
fearing the chaos of a lawless city and prosecution for cooperating with the
Slave Lords. Now only abandoned slaves
and the poor remain, and many are weak and undernourished already. Starvation will begin to take its toll soon,
perhaps in as little as two days….

 

Thus
begins the Open for the city group.

 

We
first began in a damage-control mode evaluating what people and resources we
had and how to avoid the worst of the coming humanitarian disaster. Thousands had gathered in one part of the
city but among them there were only a few able-bodied men for defense,
exploration, and aid. We established the Clam House as our base and sent scouts
to the front gate and to the plaza area to look around. The front gates were unoccupied, so we left
a small force there to monitor things.
The large plaza area in the southern part of town contained hundreds of
slaves still chained to their stations and left to die. We organized a larger relief effort to free
these slaves, and after we discovered that there was a somewhat sizable supply
of food and water there, we sought to move the mass of free people to that
area.

 

Later,
our scouts at the gate reported disappearances and glimpses of ‘shadowy’ things
outside of vision. Meanwhile, Xavier,
while leading an expedition in the plaza area to free slaves, was suddenly
joined by the paladin, Sir Konrad as he landed in the city on his pegasus. Konrad told us of a large undead army
approaching the city. This army
included level drainers that the common solder or peasant had no hope of
fighting. Xavier and Konrad decided to explore the citadel in the center of the
city as either a possible escape or defensive locale for the thousands of
helpless city inhabitants.

 

They
entered through the roof of the building with ease, and met an interesting old
man evidently quite disinterested in the current state of events. He claimed he was the high wizard for the
city, but the ruling authorities had left.
He seemed quite content to stay and await whatever fate befell the
city. And the citadel was not nearly
large enough to serve as a defense of last resort for the thousands of city
inhabitants.

 

Konrad
and Xavier were planning a desperate last ditch defense plan utilizing the
plaza area for the thousands of innocents when the Cromwellian adventuring
parties arrived. At this point the
groups merged as things became more interesting still…

 

[To be continued…]

 

~~Xavier, High Priest of Aurora [written
by Jack McKechnie with minor editing by Kyle]

 

Summary: The
Librarian and the Mysterious Artifact.

 

Starring:
Death from Above, a Cromwellian Academy party, composed of:

Taniqué, 8^th level fighter (scimitar
wielder and party leader), played by Kathryn Snead

Cherry, 5^th Level Monk / 4^th
level Scholar, played by Alan Jones

MacKensie, 6^th level fighter (bastard
sword user), played by David Jones

Sigmund, 6^th level Nevronian Cleric,
played by Brian Riedel

Kelvar, 5^th level half-orc fighter (spear
user), played by Rhonda Jones

Nygond, 5^th level illusionist, played by
Ashley Merritt

Tara, 5^th level woodsman (bow specialist),
played by Aaron Schweinsberg

Lisette, 5^th level mage, played by Joey
Hess

 

[Not present were
Borin, a level 6 dwarven fighter [and former Stone Soules member], and his
henchman Rat, a level 2 Nevronian Cleric, who were at home visiting family.]

 

While Xavier was entering Towlmere and getting a feel for
his surroundings, a Cromwellian Academy Team, Death from Above, was in
midst of a long mission pursuing the Librarian of the Academy, who had departed
under unusual circumstances some time before…

 

The adventure was a marathon, not a sprint. Our story begins with the party receiving a
mission, relating to some very troubling news.
It turns out that the Librarian, of the Library at the Academy in
Cromwell, named Thieran, had recently disappeared, along with over 12,000 gold
pieces in cash, and several ancient relics and files that had been under his
stewardship. It was our task to track
him down and bring back both the man and what he stole. Ideally we would figure out what in the
world was going on, as well.

 

We followed Thieran, learning that we were maybe a week
behind him from some of the people in the villages we spoke with. We knew that he traveled with a mule-drawn
cart and a carpenter, blacksmith, and silversmith that he had hired. Also, a group of five hobgoblins from Dorson
had been recruited.

 

His trail ended at a long set of stairs leading up a strange
mountain in the forested wilderness, which we later learned was known as the
Watchtower. The cart was left at the
base, amongst the creepy trees, and from the tracks, it seemed they had
ascended the stairs between 24 and 48 hours ago. We started climbing the stairs after them. As we trudged up the stairs, we noticed that
the walls were formed of volcanic rock, and they were carved with hundreds and
hundreds of faces. Text around the faces
indicated names and (mostly military) exploits in a dialect of the Archaic Northerner
tongue.

 

After thirty minutes of stair climbing, we came to a landing
and needed to pause to rest. At the
landing, there was a mural carved in relief in a sort of semi-dome. The scene depicted was one of an army
(around the viewer) fighting downhill.
There was a date given in an ancient language that we could not
interpret.

 

Further climbing revealed landings every thirty minutes,
each with a similar mural.

• A battle on an island.
The forces on both sides looked more-or-less the same, both Northerner.

• A scene inside a building, possibly a hallway. This one had close up images. Four Northerners and one other person in a
party with the viewer, fighting six other people.

• A scene taking place underwater, Northerners walking on
the bottom of a lake fighting others. A
large shark looms over the battle. We
see underwater structures depicted. One
prominent Northerner with a barbed spear appeared near the viewer in an arch to
the right, and we recalled that he could be found in all the images.

 

Thirty more minutes after we leave this landing, we come
near the end of the stairs. We see (and
hear) a crackling blue flame centered on some landing above us. To our surprise, we see five
disgruntled-looking hobgoblins descending the stairs. As they near us, they address us with: "Greetings,
Officers."

 

We press them for an explanation of their activities, and
they tell us that they had traveled with Thieran and helped him assemble this
bizarre aquamarine apparatus he had with him on the top of the mountain. After the device was finished, Thieran
simply stood, facing the device, doing and saying nothing. Eventually, the hobgoblins decided to leave
with their pay, although the artisans were still up above. They didn’t particularly question his motives
(he had an "official seal"), and when we informed them of Thieran’s
apparent treachery, they wanted it noted that they were acting under
orders. We let them go.

 

We rushed the rest of the way up the stairs. We saw two troughs of blue, cold, life-draining
flame, running up beside the stairs as we ran.
We could tell that it was not regular fire by the way that MacKensie’s ring
of warmth could not keep him warm next to it, and since MacKensie had
experienced this exact effect before, he knew the fire to be negative material
energy, capable of draining the life from anyone who touched it. Fortunately, none of the party tried to put
it out, although many theories were hazarded.

 

Finally, the party crested the stairs to find that the
troughs ran from the stairs to a platform on which was situated an apparatus,
composed of a round metal frame with an aquamarine-colored scepter inside. The flame was slowly ascending the troughs
to reach the upper platform. Above us,
near the device, the man Thieran turned to face us. He shouted, "The Eye is on the eye, but not the other
eye!" [capitalization uncertain]

 

Most of the party started charging up the stairs at him,
Taniqué in the lead. Tara moved to the
side and prepared a bowshot.

 

The raving cleric continued, "I am the Mad
Prophet! Wise enough to recognize my
madness, I cannot be stopped!"
With that, he launched a spell down at the party. Fearful of the deadly-seeming energy, the
illusionist Nygond had only moments in which to use a powerful one-shot item: his
mirror of spell turning. The
blast reflected back up at the priest, dropping him and everyone else up at the
platform instantly. It appeared to have
been some sort of powerful stunning spell.
We felt that we had to clear the area up above before the blue trough
flames reached the top. (Though the aquamarine ball atop the scepter was
already flaming). MacKensie, Kelvar,
and Sigmund led the effort to clear the collapsed Thieran, apparently possessed,
and the workers, off the upper platform just before it was ignited in cold
flame. Unfortunately, we could not
approach the device as it was past the flames.
Even though we didn’t know what it did (spell-ID suggested some sort of
spell-range amplifier) we decided that anything fueled by life-draining blue
flame was bad news and we wanted to put it out of commission.

 

The flames started expanding out from the scepter and it
looked as if the flames, once they passed the round frame of the device, might
explode outward and yet kill us all.
Tara activated a token of boat and launched it at the
scepter. As the boat hurtled
past the flames, it seemed to decay and break up in mid-air, but there was
still plenty of solid mass left when the boat slammed head-on into the
scepter.

 

After the impact, the scepter was bent, and it spun and
flamed erratically. It was clear we had
messed up its function to some extent, but we weren’t sure how completely. We still couldn’t approach it, but we
decided it was important to take it out once and for all, so

we came up with a plan to do just that, involving yet
another powerful one-shot item of our illusionist’s. Nygond, the illusionist, was given an Aid and a Fly
spell. He flew up high above the device
(avoiding the jet of flame) and cast an illusion of a hovering couch-sized lead
block below him. He then sprinkled 9 doses of dust of substance on the
block to give it reality, and away it fell, smashing the apparatus completely
with a violent crunch. Some bits of the
frame flew up and even hit Nygond, but the Aid spell soaked up the
damage.

 

Making use of the Fly spell, Nygond surveyed the land
around the mountain. He spotted a mass
of "people in white" to the north, moving toward the mountain. We were very concerned. Were they people, or undead? Were they coming for us, or just to the
mountain? Were they summoned here by
the light? Additionally, we weren’t
sure if we should flee immediately, or try to recover the remains of the
artifact (now squashed under a lead block).
We decided to try to recover at least the scepter, lest it fall again
into the wrong hands, so MacKensie’s engineering skills came in handy as we
spent a half hour or so moving the block, with ropes, a mule, and a potion
of giant strength.

 

During this time, we also had a chance to investigate some of
the files the cleric had taken. They
included some old maps of the region and an unknown settlement, some depictions
and descriptions of the artifact, and some strange riddles.

 

• "When the lament resounds – the hunchback’s one good
eye must focus on the evil and it will see."

• "I must eye the eye with my eye when I eye the
eye. I eye the eye on the other eye, as
I eye the eye."

 

When the block was pulled aside, we grabbed the scepter
(carefully), tossed it in a box, and fled south with the unconscious workers
and cleric.

 

We rode straight south without stopping until we got to a
costal resort hotel called the Hamilton.
We decided to rest there, and were surprised to learn that we were the
second group of Cromwellians to come through here recently. We were told that an army 100-200 strong had
passed by earlier. They came from the
east and left to the north-west.
Talking to other people in the Hamilton, we met one shady character who
said he had some items he could rent to us that might be of interest. One was a telescope on the roof of the
building (rental fee, 500 gold pieces).
He also had a boat we could rent, which we considered sailing east to
get to the Kest coast, getting the artifact remains and ourselves away to
safety as fast as possible.

 

We decided first to rent the telescope in the morning. Through it, we did not see the "white
army" we feared was chasing us, but a different small army, marching to
the east. Two of our party [Taniqué
and Kelvar?] went out to parley with them, and we would watch their
interaction through the telescope. What
we found out was that it was the Cromwellian army that had passed by the
Hamilton earlier. They had just
themselves fled a harrowing encounter with a mass of undead to the west. They had been expecting to take on a
smugglers’ camp, but found it already overrun with undead. We filled them in on the details of our
mission as well, and we decided to join them as they traveled east and then
travel south by land to the settlement of Towlmere, where, we were sure, we
could rest and be safely protected from the ravaging undead.

 

The soldiers in charge of the Cromwellian army force shared
with the party what they knew: their officers were heading to the city of
Towlmere (on a peninsula to the south and east) on a special mission with the
paladin Sir Konrad, and that was about it.
The party decided that Konrad and the army officers, if they were
operating in the area, needed to know about the weird white army, the blue
light, the undead flames, and the rest.
We also wanted to offer our services, as we had accomplished our
mission. We set off down the road after
them, and caught up with the army officers en route to Towlmere.

 

~~Tara and Taniqué, of the Cromwellian Academy
Team Death from Above

[Written by Aaron
Schweinsberg with contributions from Kathryn Snead, and compilation and minor
editing by Kyle]

 

Summary: Mission:
Confusing.

 

Memoirs of Cpt. Bernard Mathou, Wysos Regulars, Cromwellian
Expeditionary Force

10-11 June 2192
[Played by Sean Paus]

 

It started out straight forward enough. As part of the ongoing efforts to bring
order to the former Realmish regions, we were tasked to eliminate one of the
local criminal organizations near the northern Suss Forest. Our target was a slave plantation whose
primary endeavor was the manufacture of the highly addictive and dangerous drug
Spellum. Our intelligence
indicated the plantation held 200 to 300 slaves, 50 armed thugs, a few body
guards and the plantation owners. Our
goals were to rescue the slaves, destroy the crops of Spellum and any of
the drug that had been distilled, and capture as many of the slavers as
possible. Our force was composed of two
units of cavalry, two units of spearmen, a unit of heavy infantry and a unit of
crossbowmen. I was accompanied by my
second in command, Henri [Darleen], our cleric Joana [Jay Bates], our ranger
Spider and an elven scout named Pheraguat, with hippogriff mount, that we had
hired [Andrew Anderson]. Along for the
ride were two adventurers, an elven fighter/mage and Regent’s courtier named
Site Bowlength [Keith Nelson] and a human fighter and Regent’s courtier named
Jennifer Hookhill [Katherine Anderson].
Site was the slightly-overprotective “uncle” of Jennifer and had adventured
with her father Tim and with Ranore in battles against the Slave Lords many
years earlier. However, Jennifer was
quite a capable fighter and scholar on her own, and brought many skills to
bear. I was confident that with all of
these people forming our group, the forces at command should be more than
capable of handling the slave plantation.

 

Half a day before we reached the Hamilton (a resort on the
edge of the inland salt sea that had fallen into the hands of the criminal
element) we were joined by the famous and powerful paladin Sir Konrad. He indicated that he was sent by Nevron to
the region because his calling indicated that an event was imminent which could
cause much suffering and that he was there to help. This was very exciting, as we had all heard of his great deeds,
but was also disturbing as our mission did not seem to warrant his
presence. Were the forces at the
plantation more powerful than we had thought?
Could our fight with the slavers end up unleashing a force of such
destructive power as to endanger everyone in the region? Then there was the possibility that the
event requiring his presence had nothing to do with us at all. We revised our plans to assault the
plantation to include the possibility that Konrad would be present and
continued to advance on the plantation.
Joana suggested that she should perform a Divination, but that she was not currently prepared to do so. We included in our plans time for her to
prepare and perform a divination,
thinking that would aid Konrad in his activities.

 

Though our target was not the only slave plantation in the
region, we were aware of only one route to it and I did not want to alert the
slave lords prematurely. Undoubtedly,
they were already aware of our presence and nervous about our intent. Luckily, a haunted region of forest
surrounding a lone mountain called The Watchtower to the north gave me an
idea. It was my hope that by acting
like we were there to deal with some recent increase in undead activity, our
target would relax just enough for us to catch them off guard. We stopped at The Hamilton, briefly, to drop
some hints to that effect and inquire into recent activity in the haunted area
when we were approached by an individual who overheard our conversations and
provided us with some disturbing news.
He claimed to have encountered a Cromwellian official with three
prisoners and a squad of hobgoblins in tow who was also traveling north into
the haunted woods. He assumed that we
were already aware of his presence and was confused by the questions we were
asking. We asked him to describe the
official and any insignia he bore.
Based on the description, Henri [the second-in-command] determined that
he was wearing the attire of a Nevronian cleric, but could discern nothing
more.

 

I asked Konrad if his calling had anything to say about
this, and he replied that things had become much worse, but more
uncertain. We did not know how to
interpret this and continued with our plan.
He was still interested in hearing the results of Joana’s divination and decided to travel with us
until then. That was the first mistake of many we made that day. We headed north, towards the haunted region,
and camped at the edge of the forest.
After that, things started, rapidly, to fall apart.

 

First, at about midnight, we noticed a blue beam of light,
like a lighthouse beacon, shine forth from the top of The Watchtower. It swept the horizon less than a handful of
times before it wavered eratically and then went out. We all had the impression that we had missed something important.

 

Next, Konrad’s calling became more intense. Apparently, whatever event he was here for
was upon us and happening everywhere in the region. In addition, the area in most dire need of him was back the way
we came. Uncertain whether to backtrack
and help those in need, or stop whatever had been set in motion, he stayed long
enough for Joana’s divination.

 

Before Joana was ready to perform the divination, Pheraguat [mounted on his hippogriff] returned from his
scouting mission to the plantation. He
reported that the plantation had been overrun by undead, that a flying
wraithlike creature was swooping down and turning those left alive into other
wraithlike creatures. There were
hundreds of pale, mindless creatures wandering the compound. The slavers were fighting a losing battle
and were probably all dead by now. All
that was left was for Joana to perform her divination. This is what she learned:

 

The
forces of Neutral Evil, influenced by the Elder Elemental Eye, are Beyond
Descriptive Terms.

The
influence of Anar, the god of Chaos and Randomness, is Significant but Fading.

The
forces of Nevron are Meaningful.

The
puppet forces of Neutrality are very, very large and in motion.

The
chance of incurring the wrath of the forces of Evil, especially those of the
Elder Elemental Eye, is Likely.

The
chance of incurring the wrath of the forces of Nevron is Low.

The
treasure in the region is Beyond Descriptive Terms.

 

It seemed clear to us that Anar’s minions were responsible
for the beam of light we saw on The Watchtower, but had been dealt with. It also seemed clear to us that they had
either alerted or awakened the Neutral Evil forces responsible for the undead
creatures that had recently become active.
We were unsure what to make about the puppet forces of Neutrality. Whether they were puppets of the servants of
Anar or the Elder Elemental Eye, it was clear that we were all in extreme
peril.

 

Upon reflection, we should have interpreted the change in
Konrad’s calling as a sign for him to pursue the cleric of Nevron and his
prisoners. Whether the cleric was
genuine Nevronian or a servant of Anar, Konrad would have been able to deal
with the sitation and much suffering would have been averted. I am even more convinced of that given what
I learned later.

 

At some point, one of our scouts spotted a wraithlike
creature near our encampment. It did
not attack us, but its proximity to us worried me. I thought on Pheraguat’s report from the plantation and did not
want my forces to suffer the same fate.
I knew that our forces would be largely ineffectual against a horde of
wraithlike undead and decided to send them home. I also sent a messenger to King Ranore [of Cromwell] describing
what we had witnessed and the result of the divination. I then led those of us that remained south
to give Konrad any aid we could. We
noticed wraithlike creatures on wraithlike mounts following us as we travelled
south and prayed to Nevron that we were doing the right thing.

 

As we passed The Hamilton, it was clear that Konrad had
continued further south to the city of Towlmere. As we approached the peninsula we were overtaken by another group
of riders. Luckily, they turned out to
be the famous adventuring group Death from Above and not a horde of
undead warriors. Unfortunately, the
tale they told us confirmed some of my earlier suspicions and served to
illustrate just how badly we all had failed in doing Nevron’s bidding.

 

According to Taniqué, leader of Death from Above,
they were dispatched from the Academy to track down and stop the Head Librarian
of the Academy. The librarian, who was
also a cleric of Nevron, had gone insane.
He took an old broken artifact from the basement, captured three
craftsmen, and made his way to this region.
He had the craftsmen repair the artifact, which he placed in a
recepticle at the top of The Watchtower.
This device was the source of the blue light we witnessed. They did their best to stop him and managed
to destroy the beacon, but realized they had gotten there too late. They headed south in order to flee an
approaching undead army, learned of our presence in the area and caught up with
us. We agreed to join forces and aid
Konrad in his endeavors.

 

When we reached Towlmere, it was clear that the city had
been abandoned. We made our way to the
center of the city where we encountered the remaining surviving citizens and
Konrad. He was trying to find a way to
evacuate the remaining 15,000 innocents when we showed up. All of the people were in an area resembling
a park. There were earthen walls
surrounding it, but it was clear that we lacked the resources to adequately
defend it. The keep in the center of
the city was defensible, but not large enough to house all of the civillians. We were at a loss for ideas on how to
evacuate the 15,000 poor and

former slaves of the city and instead concentrated our
efforts on ways to stop the encroaching undead menace. It was then that a fog rolled in from the
sea, obscuring everything.

 

Taniqué mentioned that the librarian was spouting cryptic
riddles involving eyes looking at various things. They also mentioned seeing some bas reliefs on The Watchtower
depicting a great battle that culminated in a group of warriors traveling
through a corridor and beneath the sea.
Finally, someone noticed that the layout of the city resembled that of
an eye, and that it appeared to be "looking" at a place in the sea
known as the Isle of Patterns.

 

At the southern end of the city, at the edge of the sea,
stood a monument surrounded by a fountain.
This structure was radiating an evil force and was covered in archaic
runes that roughly translated into "Those
who serve will be strengthened."
We interpreted the clues from the bas reliefs, the Librarian’s riddles,
the shape of the city, and the location of the monument to indicate that the
source of the threat lay on the Isle of Patterns. Only one person was able to reach the isle swiftly, and that was
Konrad. We had no means, mundane or
magical, to get anyone else there in time to stop the approaching army.

Though there was a powerful wizard in the city, a recluse,
he refused to transport anyone to the isle.
We sent Konrad to the isle, hoping that he would be enough to deal with
the threat.

 

But, we didn’t give up in trying to find an alternate route
to the isle. Given the depictions on
the bas reliefs, it made sense that access to the isle should be possible from
underneath the city. In addition, given
the location of the monument it seemed to be the obvious place to start
looking. Though no one had been able to
find a way into or underneath it after centuries of searching, we endeavored to
find one. Inspection of the monument
and fountain revealed that a person could climb down the shaft from which the
water sprang, but the force of the flow would prohibit movement. I had Joana use her scroll of Lower Water on the fountain in the hopes
that we could get a man down there to investigate. The power of her magic had an unexpected effect. The monument descended into the ground, revealing
a spiral staircase.

 

Exploration of the stairs revealed a corridor, much like the
one depicted at The Watchtower. The
corridor opened up into a large room containing two large alcoves. In one of the alcoves hung a 50-foot long
adamantine shark that radiated a strong aura of Evil. The corridor continued beyond the room to the edge of
visibility. In addition, there was
evidence that the room and corridor had recently been filled with water and
that it was obvious that they would flood again once Joana’s spell
expired. Suspecting that the shark was some
sort of vehicle, I ordered a search for an entrance or hatch, neither of which
could be found.

 

Realizing that we were short on time, we returned to the
surface. When the spell expired and the
monument returned to its former position, we did the only thing we could. We started destroying the monument. Cherry and Joana started hitting it with
their hammers, and we had ropes wrapped around it that we and many of the local
populace heaved on in order to bring it down.
Eventually it collapsed, and the foundation was oddly soft and
muddy. But, with the collapse of the
monument came an unexpected and sad event.
Citizens started collapsing and dying by the hundreds. The monument’s magic had, evidently, been
feeding these people, keeping them alive under conditions beyond which their
bodies could handle. Our attempts at
saving these people were not going well.

 

All seemed lost when the undead horde arrived. They picked off our watchmen and scouts, but
left everyone inside the park alone.
Instead, they formed a ring around us, preventing our escape. It was then that someone noticed a statue,
resembling one of the figures depicted on The Watchtower, light up with archaic
runes. These runes translated as
"50", "South East" and "40". The "40" rune changed to a
"39", then a "38". Something was coming, and it would reach
the city by dawn. I feared Konrad had
failed.

 

Surprisingly soon after, Konrad returned. He said that he had made it to the
isle. On it

was a ring of 50 cylinders that had risen up from underneath
the ground. Each one was large enough
to house a creature of giant size, and each one had opened and spilled its
contents. It seemed that the undead
horde meant for us to fight these creatures to some unknown end, and it was
clear that we had, yet again, failed Nevron.

 

We prepared for the impending assault, but there was little
we could do. We were all fatigued, and
the members of Death from Above had had no sleep over the past day. I felt certain that, if the approaching
creatures did not do us in, the undead horde would…

 

[To be continued…]

 

~~Captain Bernard
Mathou [written by Sean Paus with minor editing by Kyle]

Summary: Excerpt from the
After-Action Report of Pheraguat, Cromwellian Scout

 

By Pheraguat, as played by Andrew Anderson

 

10 Jun 2192

 

Mounted on my hippogriff and armed with my bow, I was hired
to the serve as scout for the Wysos Regulars, Cromwellian Expeditionary
Force. I have served the Cromwellian
government for over a decade conducting dangerous scouting missions in the
mountains bordering the Realm. In this
capacity I provided the initial reconnaissance against the slaving and illegal
drug operations of an extensive criminal organization operating in the New and
Old Worlds [possibly the Blue and the Grey].

 

The Cromwellian army dispatched a force of about 200 men
under the command of Cpt. Bernard Mathou, and accompanied by members of the
Regent’s court, with the mission of (1) freeing the slaves and returning them
to safety, (2) destroying the drug fields, processing equipment, and any
refined drugs, (3) gathering information to further the Regent’s government’s
pursuit of the larger criminal enterprises, and finally, (4) capturing (or if
necessary, killing) the slavers at the camp.

 

From previous reconnaissance, I had identified the basic
structure of the camp. The slavers’
compound was built in the elbow of a bend of the mountains at the edge of the
haunted Suss Forest, so that its north, west, and south were protected by mountains. A wooden palisade of widely placed timbers
surrounded the rectangular camp. A gate
on the eastern fence opened onto a path leading past a guard tower to join the
main road a few miles off. Near the
gate stood the stone and timber slavers’ quarters. In the NW corner rose a small, low hill and a small farm
field. A smaller gate on the south led
from the slaves’ quarters to a mine entrance in the slope to the south. It was unknown if the mine was active or what
ore the slaves were extracting from the mine.

 

The Cromwellian party was soon joined by the Nevronian
champion Sir Konrad, the pegasus-mounted paladin, with whom I had once
adventured in the Southern Waste many years before.

 

Several days away from the compound, the party reached a
former seaside resort turned ballista-armed hotel and trading station, The
Hamilton. As the men-at-arms and mule
train waited outside, several of the officers and the courtiers entered the
hotel to speak with the locals and travelers.
In the courtyard of the hotel/resort, the officers passed a group of [Flesh-render?]
hobgoblins cooking strange fish in the courtyard. It smelled foul to the humans, but the hobgoblins were heard to
speak of it as a delicacy. The officers
learned from a merchant of a small party of four claiming to be from the
Cromwellian Academy, including one who presented official government
credentials. We also learned that
common people were fleeing the area – apparently word of the approach of
Cromwellian justice had preceded us.
The slavers’ supporters, collaborators, and a few who simply feared
being caught in the middle of any conflict were pulling up stakes and heading
west or south away from stabilizing Cromwell, following the main road skirting
the inland sea. There were also
somewhat-typical stories of strange things moving in the woods, dangerous, evil
things, and local people disappearing.
We initially did not consider these an immediate threat, but noted it
for future action. (We later saw unearthly
black-clad riders watching our campsites from great distance.)

 

The presence of another Cromwellian government party in the
area was a surprise to the army detachment, but not particularly worrying at
the time, as the group knew nothing of the group’s true identities or
goals. The stories of evil, perhaps
even undead (zombies or ghouls), stalking the wilds was noted for future
action, and additional care was taken to ensure each guard rotation would
include at least one detachment member capable of dealing with such threats
until the whole could join the combat.

 

This second piece of news, however, was the greatest concern
to the mission. Fearing for the safety
of the slaves, our primary mission, or that the narco-criminal slavers might
escape along with the evidence, I left immediately to scout the camp while the
full detachment followed as quickly as possible.

 

Landing at dusk on the far side of one of the mountains
overlooking the compound, I bedded down my hippogriff and moved down the wooded
slope to approach the camp from the south.
In anticipation of needing a diversion, I pre-positioned several
pyrotechnics above the mine entrance.
As I drew near the camp, I could hear anguished, terrorized screams and
battle orders. It sounded as though the
slavers were slaughtering their captives before making their escape. I encountered no sentries or guards as I
hurried to the compound, so I leapt to the top of the palisade. From there I witnessed death and slaughter.

 

Throughout the camp, slaves were panicked, running about in
groups of two or three or sometimes singly, ankle-chained together, dragging
empty shackles. To my horror, I saw one
shackled group of four slaves attacked by dark, shadowy shapes. Each strike from the undead turned the slave
victim into another undead spirit. The
remaining slaves continued to try to run nowhere in particular, with the empty
set of manacles dragging between or behind them.

 

A group of narco-criminal captains had emerged from their
quarters and were trying to restore order, shouting commands to the guards not
to open the gates, to keep the slaves inside the compound, even to kill those
trying to escape. Most guards were
trying to follow instructions, but discipline was breaking down. A fire near the low hill in the west of camp
illuminated more undead spilling from a new opening in the hillside, and still
more undead were being created by the spirit-wraiths’ attacks on the slaves and
guards. The guards’ attempts to defend
themselves were ineffectual, lacking magic or blessed weapons.

 

The
slaver captains seemed to be having little more luck. Although they were able to hold off most of the types of undead,
a large evil flying spectre was endlessly cackling and taunting them in some
strange language, swooping in on the group.
None appeared to understand what the specter was saying, but his presence
and attacks must have been the death knell of the slaver captains’ hope. Their own discipline was being shaken, and
they were noticeably near panic when some of their own number fell to the
shadows and turned into shadows themselves.

 

To the east at the main gate was confusion as one band of
slaver guards, under loud direction from one of the slaver captains, was locked
in combat with some of their own who were trying to open the gate and escape
the undead. The light at the gate
seemed to be keeping at bay some of the lesser wraiths, perhaps newly defiled
slaves or guards, but stronger undead shadows were savaging these guards more
than their former compatriots were.

 

I entered the compound and moved towards the eastern gate,
avoiding notice from the swarms of flying shadow-like undead. As I approached it became clear that the
band of panicked (or potentially undead-controlled) guards were going to defeat
their fellows defending the gate against slaves or guards escaping. Realizing there was nothing to be done to
defend the slaves from the masses of undead, even by joining forces with the
slavers, I made ready to return to the main Cromwellian party. I climbed the wall and dropped to the ground
outside the camp. Moving stealthily in
the brush to the south of the path, my impressions were confirmed: even had I
been able to get some of the slaves out the main gate, another pack of undead
shadows were waiting on the outside, waiting with the patience of the dead and
the impatience of the hungry.

 

I circled back up the slope, collecting my pyrotechnics and
returning to my resting hippogriff.
Despite the dangers of flying at night in the mountains, I flew off to
the southeast to warn the party of the soul-devouring undead. While the Cromwellian captains might stand a
chance, the men-at-arms and civilians would be quickly slaughtered and
converted to more undead.

 

When I returned to the detachment, they were still traveling
towards the compound as they readied plans to attack the narco-criminals and free
the slaves. After I reported on the
undead swarm, and with fresh reports of black riders in the area, Cpt. Bernard
Mathou quickly ordered the men-at-arms and mule train under the command of a
sergeant to move east on the main road at maximum speed with news of the
shadows. Reinforcements from a large
Cromwellian army were days away, but against such foes, there was nothing the
men-at-arms could have done.

 

The officers of the main Cromwellian party would turn south
towards the seaside town to ready defenses and help ease an orderly escape for
the citizens.

 

11 Jun 2192

 

Resting the hippogriff, I remained with the Cromwellian
captains overnight before they turned south in the morning. As soon as my mount was able, I returned to
the slaver drug compound, arriving in the mid-morning. Although the sun was out, a dozen zombies
moved through the courtyard. Nothing
else moved, and there were no corpses left behind from the combat the night
before. Apparently all had been dragged
off to the low hill in the NW corner, a hill that had (now, obviously) been a
barrow, and was now a portal or breeding hive for the undead. Landing on the roof of the captains’
quarters, I bedded down my mount and selected a firing position. Despite hitting with every bowshot, I was
soon running out of arrows as each zombie was the largest, toughest specimen of
that ill-fated brood. Deciding to save
my magic arrows against the chance of encountering one of the spectres, I
lowered myself from the roof, drew my long sword, and closed on the last
handful of undead. Again able to land a
blow with every swing, I kept each zombie at bay until all three had fallen.

 

With the courtyard cleared of sun-walking undead, I moved
into the slaver captains’ quarters.
Moving with caution against further undead, I moved from one floor to
the next. In several of the rooms I
found a traveling desk much like Cpt. Mathou’s and a collection of logbooks,
accounts, and other materials documenting the drugger/slavers’ work at this
compound and the larger criminal enterprise.
Collecting these items, I prepared the building for burning and moved
outside and on to the nearby barn.

 

Inside the barn were several large barrels of the drug and
processing and transporting equipment.
Wheeling the barrels outside, I tipped the barrels onto the ground,
letting the sunlight destroy the drug.

 

Searching the rest of the compound found no life, but I
discovered some human/humanoid tracks heading south out the gate to the mine
entrance. The mine’s walls were
crisscrossed with veins of a strange blue-silver metal. Approximately a hundred feet inside the mine
I discovered a small group of slaves who had been working in the mine at the
time of the attack, and a few who had fled there. A few stood shackled together with empty manacles. I gave them what food and water I carried on
my person while they told their story.
Realizing that the slaves would be unable to travel fast enough to reach
the main party before nightfall – and the likely return of the spectres and
shadows – and that, for whatever reason, the undead had not ventured into the
cave, I decided they were safest remaining deep in the mine. I brought them out into the compound to
gather as much food and water as possible and the necessary tools to free them
from the manacles. (The keys had
probably been dragged into the barrow along with the corpses of the
narco-criminal captains.) All returned
to the cave. I collected 10-20 coin
weights of the strange metal. Giving
them what comfort I could and promising to return for them, I then returned to
compound, set fire to the buildings to ensure the destruction of all the drugs
and paraphernalia, and mounted my hippogriff for another long flight.

 

Pushing
the hippogriff to the edge of its endurance, I arrived at the town of Towlmere,
on the edge of the Salt Sea, to find that the Cromwellians had met with the
town leaders. Preparations had been
made and guards posted, and meanwhile, the captains were speaking with an
ancient sage/wizard at the citadel.
While his power was inferred by all, his mental capacities were somewhat
questionable. He seemed a bit too
fatalistic to be entirely sane, at least as humans are accustomed to thinking.

 

From these discussions and others, and auguries, the
captains had learned that the eye-beacon we’d seen swing over the landscape
like a lighthouse beam earlier had apparently awakened about a dozen huge giant
greater sahaugin that had been preserved since before history in massive
pillars on a small island out on the sea.

 

(We later learned that this beacon had been activated by a
Kraken agent, who had worked in the Cromwellian Academy, but had fallen under
some evil spell, and one step in front of an official investigation, had fled
the Academy with equipment for activating the Beacon. He and his small entourage were the small Cromwellian group
traveling with official papers, of whom we heard from the merchants at the old
resort.)

 

Recognizing these sahaugin must be the bodyguard of some
Kraken or a major ally, Sir Konrad had made arrangements with a ship captain of
dubious employ to transport us to the island, as we realized this was a new
locus of evil in the area and hoped we could intercept any threat there before
it reached the town. Several townsfolk
had fled over water to the south and east also, skirting the island and heading
for the linked series of lakes that lead to Cromwell’s interior.

 

The strange metal that I had recovered from the mine was
identified as mithril. The presence of
this metal in sufficient quantities prevents scrying and other such effects,
and probably shielded the escaped slaves from detection by the undead savaging
the slaver compound. With any luck, it
would continue to do so until we could return to free the slaves hidden there,
as I had promised.

 

We’d also found that the fountain in the main square of town
was intensely magical. However, with
the awakening of the sahaugin, its magical dweomer was changing. After much investigating, we learned that
the fountain concealed a passageway.
Using a Lower Water scroll to drain the fountain, we activated a
hidden staircase descending into the ground.

 

While others calculated the duration of the Lower Water
and discussed the risks, I tied a rope to my flying harness, drew my sword and
descended the stairs. A still damp
tunnel lead due south from the town’s peninsula in the direction of the
island. As the rope played out across
the floor, several others followed me down the tunnel. The tunnel continued to slope downward. The walls depicted battles between what
appeared to be Kraken allies and land-dwellers, including one recurring
character with a trident reminiscent of fairy tales who appeared to be leading
the anti-Kraken forces. A couple
hundred feet along the floor was noticeably wetter, implying we were at depths
now straining the limits of the Lower Water spell. At about this depth we came across two large
metallic shark statues resting in racks along the walls of the tunnel. Guessing that these, too, must be defenders
of the Kraken we now expected to have been at the island, I was reluctant to
remain in the area, especially as the water would soon rise in the tunnel. Judging by the distance to the island, the Lower
Water scrolls the Cromwellians carried would never last long enough for us
to reach the island at the far end of the tunnel. Therefore, we returned to the surface.

 

When the magic of the fountain was dispelled, several
townsfolk collapsed. It turned out that
the fountain was a cursed spring that had leant the people uncommon
constitution, but now with its effect gone, they were brought low and in some
cases died. We later learned the
fountain had been built by the Kraken for their human mind-slaves who populated
the town in ancient times. Their
descendants had continued to live in the town through the centuries. Why this did not lead us to question the
loyalty of the wizard/sage in the citadel, I am still not sure.

 

As the water level rose again in the tunnel and fountain,
closing the stairs, dusk was approaching.
The guards posted throughout the city turned out to be fodder for the
undead army closing on the town from the peninsula. Few if any survived and none managed to alert us to nearness of
the danger to the north. While Konrad
and I took to the air, the others boarded the ship captain’s vessel. The undead followed the boat but never
overtook it, apparently by choice as they were clearly not moving as fast as
they could. On land, too, the undead seemed
willing to wait, keeping their distance until some unknown signal. To the south, however, breaking from the
waves we could now see the greater sahaugin lords emerging. This, apparently, was the signal. The battle was joined.

 

 

Summary: Drawn
of Nevron’s Will.

 

After a recent trip to the Shrine of Nevron, the paladin Sir
Konrad gained the ability to sense when and where innocents were in
danger. At the start of the events of
this day – midmorning of June 10, 2192 – Konrad was traveling toward an area
that contained a midsized group of people needing his assistance. After coming across a Cromwellian
Expeditionary Unit on its way to remove a drug plantation that had
approximately 200 to 400 slaves being forced to work the drug fields, the direction
and distance coincided with Konrad’s sense of where he was needed. He therefore decided to accompany the
Cromweliian Unit under the assumption that their missions were complementary. After discussing options with the
expedition’s leader, Konrad offered his assistance for as long as his mission
allowed.

 

After making plans for the assault and sending an aerial
unit (Pheraguat) out to scout the plantation for more recent information, the
Expeditionary Unit and Konrad began moving toward the target site – their path
took them past an Inn that had been taken over by criminal elements in the
area. After arriving at the Hamilton
[the previously mentioned Inn] with the Expeditionary leader Bernard and his
lieutenant Henri to try and disseminate some false information about the unit’s
presence in the area, the three ironically enough used the cover story that the
Cromwellian troops were there to provide support for Konrad in removing the
undead presence in the northern Suss Forest.
While playing the role of trying to gain information we learned that
tens of thousands of people had fled the area because of rumors that the Army
was on its way. Also, they learned that
a Cromwellian official was travelling north into the forest with prisoners and
a royal order to take them deep into the forest and leave them. While an interesting piece of information
this was outside the scope of the Expeditionary Unit’s orders and in a
different direction from where Konrad was needed.

 

The Cromwellian forces, Konrad and its leaders, then
proceeded on towards the edge of the haunted forest to the north to further
disguise their true target, with the intention of turning back to the west
after reaching the edge of the forest.
After reaching the forest at approximately dusk, the group stopped for
the night and the expedition’s cleric slept for a spell shift to be able to
cast a Divination. Not long after setting up camp, a rotating
blue beam appeared from the north – moments later it started wobbling
erratically and then

stopped.

 

During the travel Konrad’s feeling that he was traveling in
the right direction began to fade – by nightfall Konrad got the impression
there were thousands of people in danger and the largest concentration was back
the way they had come. Since the
decision was made to cast a Divination,
Konrad decided to wait for Joana (the Nevronian Cleric) to wake and cast the
spell before moving off to help the people in danger.

 

At approximately three in the morning, Pheraguat returned
with news that the drug plantation had been attacked by a several wraithlike
creatures, the slaves had been turned into more of these creatures and the
criminals were also falling, even though they were able to put up some minor
resistance. Shortly after this report,
guards reported seeing shadowy horseback figures scouting out our camp.

 

The Divination
revealed an evil influence that was "beyond describable terms" as
well as an additional Nevronian presence of a similar power level to the
Cromwellian presence and that the forces of Anar had influence that was fading
quickly. All of this was in a 15 to 20
mile radius around the peak known as the Watchtower.

 

With the reports of large numbers of level draining undead
we came to the decision to send all the regular troops [now being referred to
as "wraith-fodder"] out of the area and back to the areas under
Cromwellian military control as quickly as possible. At this point Konrad took to the air toward where he felt the
most need for his presence.

 

After several hours Konrad arrived at the city of Towlmere,
on a peninsula in the salt sea – exactly where he felt he was needed. While overflying the city and noticing how
relatively empty it was, Konrad finally spotted an armored figure that appeared
to be in charge and landed to inform them of the approaching danger. Both individuals were quite surprised to
find they already knew each other – the armored person was the Auroran cleric
Xavier [played by Jack McKechnie].
Xavier was in Towlmere to help with a slave revolt and was currently
involved with finding food and supplies to help the now-freed slaves. Konrad’s news that a large undead army was
on its way was less than pleasantly received.
Konrad, Xavier and the resistance leaders then worked on finding a way
to protect as many people as possible from the undead.

 

During their time in the city Xavier and the people he was
helping had noticed a keep in the center of the city, but had made no attempt
to make it past the barred gates. With
the new information and the addition of a flying mount, entering and exploring
the keep became feasible and more urgent.
Konrad and Xavier flew to the top of the keep and after Xavier detected
a trap on the only entrance to the building – Konrad decided to

force the door open, causing a dart trap to fire, but with
no effect. Once inside we found an old
man who was once the high wizard for the city – he informed us that the keep
would only hold around 1000 of the more than 20,000 survivors in the city. Lacking any other options we decided to
bring all the people we could into the warehouse district, which still had
standing city walls, and into the keep.

 

After making what arrangements we could, we waited. Soon the
officers from the Cromwellian Expeditionary Unit arrived in the company of a Royal
Academy Team, bringing additional information about the undead coming out of
the forest and some more information about the undead army and the strange blue
beam from the evening before.

 

With several ancient riddles and being able to compare
ancient and recent maps of the city, as well as local rumors of a hidden tunnel
out to the island in the middle of the salt sea, we found that the monument in
the center of the city fountain now had writing in an ancient script that had
only recently appeared and that now detected as Evil when Konrad checked it –
despite the fact that this monument had been checked before by people looking
for the underwater tunnel. Attempts to
find a secret entrance were unsuccessful, so Konrad flew back to The Hamilton
to procure a ship the Academy team had talked to a local smuggler about
chartering. Upon arriving at The
Hamilton, Konrad was recognized and struck a deal with the captain of the ship
to sail to Towlmere and ferry parties to the Isle of Patterns. While the ship was preparing to sail, crew
members rushed down to the boat to announce that undead were attacking the
inn. Konrad gave orders that the ship
sail immediately and then took to the air to see if he could help any of the
people on the ground. Seeing that he
could make no difference, Konrad made certain the ship was on its way and then
heading back to the city.

 

Upon arrival, Konrad learned that the people remaining had
found a way to open the portal blocked by the monument and was asked to check
out an artifact in the tunnel below.
This artifact was a 50-foot long shark made entirely of adamantite and
it radiated immense Evil. Since the
tunnel appeared to only be open while the monument was submerged, everyone
decided to return to the surface.

 

Konrad decided to fly over to the island to see if anything
could be done to ward off the undead army or evacuate the people in the
city. Upon reaching the island there
was a chamber that had recently opened that contained two vertical rows of 25
cylinders – each cylinder was 9 to 10
feet tall, open and still dripping fluid onto the floor. Konrad headed back to the city to report the
50 "large somethings" were most likely on the way.

 

During Konrad’s travels the remaining forces in the city
began to receive reports of guards and city inhabitants disappearing, the
civilians in the city started to panic and once the small ship arrived they
became extremely agitated – clearly thinking they were going to be
abandoned. The various groups left in
the city decided to destroy the monument and began attacking it with digging
equipment while another team attempted to pull the monument down. After Konrad returned, the undead forces
pulled back from the city

and appeared to just be waiting – another monument had also
started running a message that translated as "50 <something> South 40 miles" and the distance was
dropping – so whatever had come out of the cylinders was obviously coming
closer. We could not figure out a way
to get the civilians out past the undead and could only try to contain the
growing fear and potential riot. We
were in serious trouble…

 

[to be continued…]

 

~~Sir Konrad [written
by Rodger Henson with minor editing by Kyle]

 

 

Summary: “One of the Many Tiny Safeguards…”

 

[Title reference: Warwick’s investigation of the Inviolate
Realm of Horbani contained in the summary of the Weather Front’s expedition to
the Fane of the Winds. http://blog.telvar.net/2000/12/alegras_final_summary_the_fane.html]

 

A little background:

 

Twelve thousand years prior to the events described herein,
the Great War that pitted the sentient races of Telvar against the evil
slavemasters known as the Kraken was in full swing. Fighting on the side of the giant squid-like Kraken were their
human and non-human slaves, conditioned and controlled mentally by the powerful
tentacled creatures, as well as several allied native races including the
aquatic sahaugin (or devil-men).

 

In general, these slaves did not come to voluntarily fight
on behalf of their Masters. Prior to
the war, the slaves of the Kraken were housed in large camps of many thousands,
where control was total and life was brutal and short. Any chance that the slaves had to escape the
mind control of the Kraken was crushed.
The worship of gods, the practice of magic, and the use of mental powers
of a psionic nature were all repressed.
In the slave camps, the Kraken erected huge monuments that had several
effects on their captives. First, they
were erected as sites of worship of the Masters. Second, the monuments helped improve the physical conditioning of
the slaves, allowing the Masters to keep them alive even while depriving them
of food and other sustenance. Lastly,
and most importantly, these monuments kept the populace controlled. That is, all who lived for a period of time
under the influence of the monuments rendered themselves susceptible to the
mind control of the Kraken. These
monuments made the coming revolt against the Kraken much more difficult for
those who opposed them, because their erstwhile allies (i.e., the slaves) were
unable to rise up in solidarity, because the Masters held sway over their
feeble mental states.

 

That being said, over years of super-secret training and
planning, a Resistance formed against the tentacled Masters. Humans and those of other races who had
escaped mind control and managed to escape the slave camps had managed to learn
military, magical, and clerical skills, and over time had developed the great
abilities and magical items necessary to fight the Kraken. They were joined and aided by the inland and
underground peoples of Telvar (such as dwarves), and those resistant or immune
to mental control, particularly golems and undead.

 

In the course of the War against the Masters, the undead in
particular formed an important phalanx in the offensive and defensive power of
the Resistance. Eventually, these
undead came to be directed from a number of separate areas known as the
Inviolate Realms. Some of those who had
formed the Resistance had developed the necessary knowledge to allow them to
either summon or, in fact, become extremely powerful magical
undead, likely liches of some form, in order to form and control the undead of
these Realms. [As an aside, one of these Realms, located in the present day Dim
Forest, was known as the Inviolate Realm of Horbani, which may be familiar to
those who have followed the adventures of Warwick, Principal Ranger of
Cromwell.]

 

With the aid of these Inviolate Realms and the rest of the
sentient beings who formed the Resistance, the War eventually ended. In battles which took place both on Telvar
and across the Plane, the Kraken were driven out of Telvar and eventually off
the Material Plane, their minions slain or freed from the Masters’ influence.
[The Restinford Defenders have also encountered some of the descendants
of the Resistance, who fight the Kraken in other parts of the Multiverse. The news is not good: http://blog.telvar.net/2000/01/defenders_summary_75_wheel_of.html
]

 

***

 

Meanwhile, back in our current situation:

 

The Inviolate Realm of Tarana was one of the Resistance
outposts in the War and its aftermath.
The Realm was controlled by three individual once-humans who had become
powerful undead guardians to lead the Realm in perpetuity. The three each possessed unique
talents: one was a peerless fighter [18^th
level, played by Sean Guarino], the second an archpriest [20^th
level, played by Joel Green] of the Elder Elemental Eye (a neutral to neutral
evil deity of elemental destruction, represented by a floating eye), and the
third was an archmage of unparalleled learning [18^th level, played
by Kyle MacLea] and the nominal leader of the Realm. The trio agreed to a binding contract between themselves and the
fellow heroes who continued to battle the Kraken across the Multiverse: they (along with those who had fallen in
battling the Masters) would sleep as undead until such time as they were called
upon once more to battle the Kraken. As
the Inviolate Realm of Tarana slipped into slumber, the other surviving heroes
removed the last vestiges of the Kraken’s domination of Telvar, eliminating the
remaining servants of the Kraken and destroying temples, magical items, and any
artifacts that they could find.

 

The rulership of this Inviolate Realm of Tarana came with
many abilities. The trio could
instantly detect any Kraken, servant of the Kraken, or Kraken artifact within
the domain of the Inviolate Realm. They
could summon vast numbers of various types of undead (some unfamiliar to the
adventurers of today), from several sites in the Realm. The two chief sites of interest to this
story were known as the Warriors’ Cairns, where the Righteous Fallen who had
died fighting the Kraken had been buried and could be called upon in need to
fight the Kraken again, even in death.
The leaders of the Realm could call upon some of these undead as
commanders, or use their power to see through their eyes, or even make them a
conduit for a portion of each controlling lich’s spell-casting or combat
ability. Though using any of their
abilities or control would cost power, and the Inviolate Realm had a finite
pool of resources from which to draw their strength in battling the Kraken,
this store of power was extremely large and in most cases would be more than
sufficient to deal with any minor advances or infiltrations of the Masters or
their servants.

 

Despite this, it had cost the liches a large amount of their
reserve power simply to wake up from their slumber. If they needed to leave the inner Sanctum of their power, the
temple they lay in, it would cost them more still. And such was the nature of their original contract that though their
power to battle the Kraken was immense, but it was not infinite. The trio could not venture outside the
boundaries of the Inviolate Realm.

 

The Realm itself was built at the site of a former slave
camp. The area of control stretched
across a forested region bordered mostly by mountains in the north, open to the
east and west, and stretched into a large inland salt sea containing a defunct
Kraken temple. The slave camp was
located on a finger-shaped peninsula of land extending south into the lake from
the edge of the forest. The forest
filled the valley, stretching to within a few miles of the lakeshore and the
eastern and western passes. Inside the
forest were two of the Warriors’ Cairns, one on the eastern side of the Realm,
the other on the west, from which they could deploy their undead minions. In addition to the temple where the leaders
of the Realm slept, there was also a war memorial in the form of a huge
pyramid, called the Hall of Faces [and referred to as the Watchtower by other
parties in this adventure]. It
contained images of the faces of those who had died fighting the Kraken. At the Hall of Faces was an immense scrying
device, something of a “Kraken radar” which allowed the archmage lich to both
survey their own Realm and to look beyond it for signs of Kraken infiltration
in the area. Finally, in the
northeastern corner of the Inviolate Realm lay a dormant volcano called
“Roaring Fool.” The pent-up energy
contained in this volcano could be released in the event of complete distaster
in the Realm and wipe invader and defender alike from the face of Telvar. This option of last resort was considered a
sort of “reset button” should the Kraken or their minions succeed in
overrunning the defenses of the Realm.

 

***

 

The power contained in the Inviolate Realm was immense, but
dormant.

 

Twelve thousand years passed, and the three slumbered.

 

Their Realm was quiescent, patrolled by a small coterie of
undead. Though considered “Haunted” and
mysterious, it was hardly a threat to the surrounding lands.

 

The true nature of the valley was forgotten by the locals,
and over time, many things changed…

 

***

 

Consciousness returned, foggily, to the long-sleeping
leaders of the Inviolate Realm of Tarana at dusk on June 10, 2192. All they knew, initially, was that something
had woken them up.

 

They came to several realizations about their territory
almost instantly, even without the mage’s special scrying device, which had
become broken over the course of millenia.
[As an aside, although it wouldn’t
be difficult to fix the device, it would take some effort. But other observations about their Realm
were instantly much more important, and so the initial realization of the loss
of the scrying device was not deemed to be a terribly serious one.]

 

Most shockingly, though, it was apparent to the leaders of
the Inviolate Realm that the former slave camp had been resettled and was now
home to about 35,000 sentient beings, all of whom were corrupted by the
Kraken!

 

It seemed that the other heroes who had fought beside the
leaders of the Realm, who had been assigned the task of removing all vestiges
of Kraken rule from the face of Telvar while the Realm slept, had failed them
in several important ways.

 

First, the monument built by the Kraken to control their
subjects in the slave camp still stood, and was exerting its influence over
these 35,000 beings. Second, the Kraken
temple, though ruined and crumbling, still stood intact in the chambers beneath
its island in the salt sea. Held in
stasis in these chambers were fifty of the greater sahaugin that had served the
Kraken so faithfully in their war. This
was highly disappointing.

 

Although they would need to learn more about the region by
using the scrying device when it was fixed, the trio laid out a series of
objectives in priority order:

 

First and foremost: Destroy the black stone Kraken monument by
whatever means necessary. The 35,000
sentient beings living within its aura would become instant slaves should the
Kraken return, something that could not be allowed to happen. Though the leaders of the Inviolate Realm
felt certain that the 35,000 could be slaughtered if necessary, it would be
preferable to leave them alive to fight as allies against the Kraken if it did
not interfere with the Realm’s other goals.

 

Second: Use as little power as possible in all
tasks, so as to conserve the maximum amount of power for use in an eventual war
against the Kraken.

 

Third: Rip down the remnants of the Kraken temple,
on its island in the salt sea and slay the fifty sahaugin servants of the
Kraken found there.

 

The remaining goals were potentially mutually contradictory,
but laid out several contingencies wherein the Realm could maintain itself as a
hedge against the Kraken, should the top goals above (destroy the monument,
scatter the slaves, destroy the devil-men on the island, and use as little
power as possible in doing so) be unworkable.

 

Fourth: Slay any sentient beings affected by the
monument (especially should they become charmed by the Kraken or should the
destruction of the monument become impossible).

 

Fifth: Remove all sentient beings from the
Inviolate realm or slay them.

 

Sixth: Kill as many sentient beings as possible,
especially those that have settled inside the Inviolate Realm. Their corpses could be dragged back to the
Temple or the Warriors’ Cairns to serve as further undead guardians for future
battles with the Kraken.

 

Seventh: Slay all living things, even non-sentient
ones. They may also be made into
undead.

 

Eighth: Raze the slave village and destroy any other
remnants of the Kraken, especially those of a magical nature.

 

***

 

The trio immediately began establishing forces and plans to
meet their objectives, closed within the walls of the Temple. With access to virtually every mage and
clerical spell, and an absurdly huge reserve of undead, the question became one
of moderation and preservation of resources.
The elegance of the solution
was the challenge here.

 

Second, they considered what threats they might face. Who had woken them up, and why? The Kraken did not seem to have
returned. Was it an accident, or
deliberate? Were those responsible
aware of their power? Was it servants
of the Kraken or enemies who had done it?
Were meddling Korians involved?
(Being high-level undead masters, they worried that they might be facing
a Korian invasion—the Korians’ hatred of undead, even as protective hedge
against the mind-dominating Kraken, was known to them.)

 

Without more information, it seemed difficult to formulate
specific defenses, other than to create contingency plans in case the Temple or
other important locations were breached.
Clearly, lacking the scrying device would slow down their reaction.

 

The monument was top priority, and they needed information
about its surroundings. How could it be
destroyed? They imagined that the
thousands of sentient beings had likely enclosed the monument in some sort of
protective temple, likely devoted to the worship of this ancient evil
force. They envisioned all sorts of
magical and non-magical guardians and protective walls, and so they needed a
creature that could at least infiltrate the defenses and scout for them,
quietly. To accomplish this they
dispatched a single wraith (from the small pool of already existing undead
guardians) that they could see through and command (although it was not a
conduit for spells—this they saved for a later time when they would know the
defenses). Its task: to scout the city
and report on the defenses around the monument.

 

Next, they hatched a plan to attack the monument that could
react to information from the wraith scout.
They would send two identical forces, one out of the western cairn, and
the other out of the eastern. These
forces were each led by a spectre “conduit” (one spectre linked to the cleric,
through which is could cast its spells of power, and the other linked to the
archmage) that would be used as a force to destroy the monument with a nasty
spell of some sort (that would be determined later). Escorting the spectre would be a wraith and five shadows—all
ethereal or nearly ethereal beings that could travel relatively quickly and
escape notice. The wraith and the
shadows would provide distraction for any guards while the spectre assaulted the
monument. Because the leaders of the Inviolate
Realm couldn’t risk failure on the primary objective, they created these two
identical forces to provide redundancy.
The two forces would approach from different angles and hopefully learn
a bit more about the inhabitants as they went.
These forces could only travel by night and take cover in the
forest. Fortunately, the forest
stretched to the coast, whereupon the forces could take refuge in the water and
continue traveling, perhaps even in daylight in the depths.

 

To confuse the inhabitants of the slave camp further, and to
keep their attention away from the locations important to the Realm, they
conceived of several stratagems. To
cause chaos inside the slave camp itself, they dispatched 20 shadows. The shadows’ job was to make more shadows,
terrorize the sentient beings, and otherwise keep their attention directed away from the monument. To create additional distracting targets
outside the slave camp, the liches created a large army of weak undead: 800
skeletons, 20 ghouls, 10 wights, and 1 ghast (which acted as a conduit for the
vastly powerful fighter [played by Sean Guarino] and could channel his
tremendous combat abilities). This army
could be obliterated if met in combat by determined soldiers or unknown
high-level adventurers, but the liches hoped their enemies might consider this
army to be the true threat.

 

In addition, the liches deployed most of their pre-existing
undead forces to protect the western pass around the Hall of Faces. It wasn’t a particularly strong force, but
it would provide them with warning in case someone approached the Temple
area. Being personally drawn into
combat would be highly embarrassing even
though the results of such a combat would be well-known in advance. Better to keep meddling fools away from the places
of power with an appropriate show of force.

 

Additionally, more scouting would need to occur. They sent a single spectre (not a
spell-casting conduit, but merely a scout) by which they could observe the
Kraken temple (on its island in the salt sea) and ideally kill the sleeping
Kraken servants there.

 

Lastly, they created 10 wights mounted on spectral horses to
race about the forest and scout the terrain.
Their goal would be to determine who had already penetrated the borders
and provide eyes-and-ears for the trio, given the loss of the archmage’s
scrying device. And certainly they
could also deal with riff-raff, as necessary.

 

Satisfied, they waited for the results of their
manipulations. The trio didn’t have to
wait long before several new factors made
themselves known, if you will.

 

***

 

Two hours after waking and deploying forces, the mage’s
scrying device atop the Hall of Faces suddenly turned on. Apparently, the trigger
that had awakened the Realm was someone attempting to fix the artifact.

 

Confused but intrigued, the archmage and his comrades
immediately received a flash vision of the Inviolate Realm and its immediate
surroundings. Several things had
changed in the preceding 12,000 years.

 

First and foremost, the forest no longer stretched to the
coast. It had been cut back for a dozen
miles or more; simultaneously the salt sea’s level had dropped and the coast
and had shifted a bit farther away.
This geographic shift would cause complications when the deployed undead
reached the edge of the forest. Could
they reach the salt sea in time?

 

Second, the slave camp was a sprawling city covering the
entire peninsula, with several colonies dotting the coast of the sea.

 

Third, someone had
repaired the scrying device!

 

Mere seconds after the scrying device powered on, the liches
saw something truly bizarre: a large
wooden boat crashed down onto the
scrying device, causing everything to go blurry and giving the mage a
momentary headache.

 

Clearly the Inviolate Realm had been penetrated more deeply
than originally anticipated. Something
would have to be done.

 

A divination on
the Hall of Faces revealed some interesting facts:

 

The
forces of Nevron are piddling.

The
forces of Anar are beneath notice and
rapidly fading.

Treasure
is not worth picking up.

Chances
of incurring the wrath of forces of good are low.

 

[Before you laugh
hysterically at these results, recall that divination gives power levels with respect to the caster, a 20^th level archpriest… The problem with casting divination at this level is that it gives extremely
low resolution results. What’s “piddling”? Ninth
level?]

 

The liches had a few theories on what was happening. One was that an adventuring party (say
mid-level from a normal adventurer standpoint) of Nevronian meddlers had penetrated
the Hall of Faces to repair the ancient magical device. The boat was their airship that they used to
reach the central section of the forest.
They had an anarchist traitor amongst them, who tried to betray them by
destroying the item they were trying to fix, and he was currently bleeding to
death. [Which turned out to be exactly backwards, ironically. Though of course the airship turned out to
be pure nonsense.]

 

No Korians, at least.
That was good.

 

The liches decided on two new actions in response. They deployed a new army to strike at the
Hall of Faces and trap the adventurers inside: 300 skeletons, 6 zombies on
horseback with non-magical metallic armor (to make them look scarier), 20
ghouls, 2 ghasts (one a conduit for the fighter), 20 wights made invisible by invisibility, 10’ radius, and 1
wraith. Secondly, we created two
spectres to act as backup conduits for the mage and cleric.

 

***

 

At about this time, the small force of a spectre (under the
control of the cleric), a wraith, and five shadows that had been deployed out
of the western cairn discovered that just a few hundred yards away lay some
sort of walled compound, containing several hundred sentient beings!

 

This would need to be dealt with, since it was very close to
the Warriors’ Cairn. The spectre led
the force over the walls of the compound, where it discovered that the hundreds
of sentient beings were all neatly chained together. They could not run, and inexorably the five shadows swarmed over
them and converted them all…

 

***

 

With several hundred new shadows, a new wraith, and a new
spectre, the lich archpriest considered the compound itself through the eyes of
his conduit spectre. There were a small
number of sentient beings inside, likely more powerful than the prisoners
outside. Still, it would be worth an
assault. The spectre poked his head
through the floor, and drained the energy out of one of the inhabitants before
he knew what had happened.

 

Widespread panic came about as a few hundred shadows swarmed
into the mansion. Panic and screams
gave way as the more sturdy defenders slowly collapsed and retreated to the
ground floor so that the spectre couldn’t drain
them through the floor. A mage
retreated out of the compound onto the solid earth, and just before he was
crushed under the press of shadows, he saw a vision in the moonlight of a
spectral being dancing and cackling madly in an ancient tongue…

 

***

 

Several minutes after their vision through the scrying
device had gone blurry, the liches’ scrying device suddenly terminated. The sight went completely dark.

 

At a loss for what had happened, the liches decided to spy
on those in the Hall of Faces. They
cast a clairvoyance on the room,
revealing an odd scene: they saw humans in armor with ropes and a pulley attempting
to pull a 6’ x 6’ x 6’ lead block off of the crushed remains of the scrying
device!

 

***

 

A few hours later in the evening, the western group, now
nearly three hundred shadows strong, deployed a dozen zombies to haul the
remaining corpses to the Cairn. Then
they set off south for their rendezvous with the monument.

 

Meanwhile, the scout wraith had arrived at the slave camp
city. It observed many torches and a
considerable amount of movement—this struck the liches as odd since the shadows
had not yet arrived to stir up the populace to panic. The wraith continued south to the heavily defended compound the
monument surely lay concealed within…

 

… and the liches were, to be kind, flabbergasted.

 

The wraith saw a park.
Inside the park was a row of statues, a random one of which was the
black stone Kraken monument!

 

The fools considered the Kraken monument to be… art?!

 

Suddenly, the liches felt like things would go
smoothly. The monument was not only
unguarded, completely out in the open, but clearly the denizens of the slave
camp didn’t even realize the monument had any significance at all!

 

This simplified matters.
The liches considered various spells to destroy the monument when the
first conduit spectre arrived. They
came up with a number of alternatives for both the cleric and mage, should
either be called upon to attack it.
Given this lack of security, perhaps the skeleton armies could simply
rip it down.

 

At around the same time, the army approaching the Hall of
Faces arrived and stormed the compound… but found it abandoned. Clearly the adventurers had either seen the
army coming or they had just departed too quickly. The army followed in hot pursuit, the speedy conduit ghast
leading the way. The ghast caught up to
the party as it fled, but it seemed that unless they stopped to rest for the
evening within the forest, the army would be forced to halt at the forest’s
edge with the coming of day and let them escape.

 

***

 

The sun rose, severely hampering the progress of the liches’
forces. Both large armies and the
shadows sent to disrupt the slave camp were forced to halt at the edge of the
forest. The wraith inside the camp took
cover in an abandoned warehouse near the monument. The three-hundred-shadow army heard from the scouting wights on
spectral horseback that an army of perhaps a hundred humans had reached the
edge of the forest, then abruptly turned east on a trajectory vaguely back
toward the slave camp, or a bit north of it.
The shadows could not follow during the day, and the pursuit would have
to wait.

 

With the coming of dawn, the spectre ordered to reach the
Kraken temple suffered grave misfortune.
Due to severe miscalculation, the creature somehow managed to get
obliterated by sunlight despite being deep underwater. This would slow down the liches’
reconnaissance as they were forced to reconsider how to deal with the Kraken
temple.

 

In the end, it was decided to merge the two large armies
into a greater force and march it south into the harbor east of the slave camp
peninsula. The army could then be
deployed either against the camp and the monument en masse, or continue south
to destroy the Kraken temple. This gave
the liches additional flexibility and allowed them to avoid creating any new
undead forces (which would not reach the slave camp for a couple of days).

 

Meanwhile, it became apparent that the dozen zombies that
were supposed to be hauling corpses from the compound back to the cairn had
suffered some misfortune. The
archpriest used a scrying spell to uncover what had happened. He saw a man on a griffon had been flying
about and putting arrows through the poor defenseless zombies. The man was now setting the fields on fire!

 

This was annoying.
Unfortunately there was no force nearby to deal with this griffon rider,
so the liches ignored it for the time being.

 

Realizing that time was passing, the liches needed to find a
way to get the skeleton army to the slave camp during the daylight. A control
weather spell provided a dense fog that shielded the undead from the sun’s
harmful rays and allowed them to reach the coast unobserved. The skeleton army reached the harbor and
sank beneath the waves, marching underwater.

 

***

 

As dusk settled, the other forces were finally free to
advance once more. The twenty shadows
arrived in the slave camp and began causing problems, making various sentries
“disappear” from the walls. The
archpriest-led shadow army advanced east along the coast of the salt sea,
heading toward the western side of the slave camp. Much to the surprise of the liches, the force encountered another
settlement built along the shore.

 

Someone had actually built, for lack of a better phrase, a resort hotel along the shoreline! There were several hundred sentient beings
inside.

 

The archpriest didn’t hesitate. Hundreds of shadows swarmed down on the guests of the hotel. Shrieks and cries of panic turned to eerie
silence as the shadows swallowed the souls of the humans, sapping their
strength and replicating anew. A group
of four swashbucklers held in a corner and fought valiantly, slaying nearly
eighty shadows, but they were trapped and they knew it. The cleaning staff had been on the second
floor and thus instantly wiped out by the non-corporeal energy-draining creatures, like the spectres. The carnage was complete and shockingly
fast.

 

Over five hundred shadows departed the eerily quiet resort,
heading east toward the slave city…

 

***

 

The wraith observing the monument noticed a lot of
activity. Someone had taken an interest
in the monument. It seemed like this
wouldn’t matter to the liches, but they underestimated the foolhardiness of the
townsfolk…

 

A small group of people appeared, and cast something at the
monument. They began fiddling around
with the symbols, and then suddenly the monument sank into the ground,
revealing a doorway and staircase!

 

…and instantly the liches sensed the sahaugin in the Kraken
temple wake from their sleep. They
awoke, armed, and left the temple, swimming directly for the slave camp and the
monument, which they would reach in a single day…

 

As these matters unfolded, the wraith observed a different
monument near the site of the Kraken monument began displaying a flaming
warning. It read: “50 Servants of the Kraken, South-East,
Distance: 40 Miles.”

 

Furthermore, the wraith observed the foolhardy humans wander
down into the revealed passage, then re-emerge a while later. It seemed they hadn’t found much of
interest, but they knew nothing of the danger heading for them.

 

***

 

This was not good.
Matters had come to a head more quickly than the liches had hoped. They could not afford to experiment and
needed to make sure the monument was destroyed. What spell would destroy the monument? Additionally, what would happen when the sahaugin reached the
monument? Could they enthrall the
slaves and create 35,000 new servants for the Kraken?

 

If the sahaugin could take over the populace, then they
would need to be defeated beforehand.
This would mean taking the skeleton army and fighting the sahaugin
devil-men on the creatures’ own terms in the sea between the Kraken temple and
the monument. This was not something
the liches relished.

 

In order to be safe and narrow down their options, the
archpriest Communed with his god, the
Elder Elemental Eye, and asked:

 

Can
the monument be destroyed by Earthquake? Yes

Can
the monument be destroyed by Disintegrate? Yes

Can
the monument be destroyed by Transmute
Rock to Mud? Yes

Can
the Sahaugin charm the populace of the city?
No

 

This simplified matters considerably. The sahaugin need not be prevented from
reaching the monument. In fact it might
be possible to use them to annihilate the slave camp. But it would need to be done very carefully. None of the sahaugin could escape in the
aftermath.

 

***

 

The conduit spectre force attached to the archmage finally
arrived at the monument center a few hours later, from the east. There was a crowd gathered around the
monument, and there seemed to be considerable signs of panic amongst the populace. This set the stage for the attack on the
monument to begin.

 

Suddenly an area of sunlight surrounded the monument for a
hundred yards, holding back the unnaturally powerful fog the liches had created
earlier. Though it initially gave the
liches pause, it turned out to be not much of an obstacle, as the range of the
liches’ spells vastly exceeded those of the humans.

 

The spectre, wraith, and shadows rose from hiding and caused
considerable panic. The spectre faced
the monument and through him the archmage cast a powerful dispel magic upon it, followed by Transmute Rock to Mud. The
monument melted and sank into the ground.
The undead then retreated into a warehouse to await the arrival of the
devil-men.

 

These Kraken-spittle would be destroyed as the others that
the Inviolate Realm had faced over the millennia had been vanquished… With as
much enthusiasm as soulless undead could muster.

 

Finale: The
Battle Is Joined.

 

The undead in the water simply watched impassively as the
flaming warning burning on the surface of the remaining protector monument
showed that the Servants of the Kraken had arrived. Promptly the water in the harbor swelled and from the depths
emerged fifty great devil-men, each with four arms wielding gigantic spears. The populace of Towlmere, the city built on
the ruins of the Kraken slave camp, cringed and waited as the creatures
advanced onto the shore, fast approaching the guards.

 

The wizard of Towlmere’s citadel reacted. The liches blinked. Two spectres arose from
the waves as the strongest adventurers stepped forward to confront the evil
from the sea. Power surged.

 

Several things happened simultaneously. The low-power spells were cast aside
contemptuously by the sahaugin, but they could not evade the power of the
greater magic cast at them. The water
surrounding the devil-men fell away,
exposing them fully to the attacks of the people on the shore and the undead in
the water.

 

A gigantic swarm of meteors crashed into the group of
sahaugin, sending them bleeding to the ground, horribly injured. Before the creatures could react, two huge flamestrike spells exploded over the
survivors of the meteor swarm,
exposing the creatures’ weakness to fire.
A tremendous fireball
barbecued the devil-men on the shore, as the city’s warriors advanced to finish
off the weakened Servants of the Masters.

 

The slaughter was total.
Fifty devil-men lay dead on the wet shore, crushed, burned and pummeled.

 

The silence was broken by the sound of creaking bones. A single skeleton emerged, dripping, from
the water and approached the humans huddled in the dying city. It proclaimed loudly, in an ancient tongue,
this message to the people (which was translated by the old archmage from the
citadel):

 

“This land is part of the reclaimed Inviolate Realm of
Tarana.
You are ordered to leave the area immediately, or perish.”

 

And so it was agreed.
The former denizens of Towlmere abandoned the area to the undead horde
and the trio of liches re-established their domain, destroying what little
remained of the Masters’ handiwork.

 

And they prepared for the Kraken’s inevitable return.

 

~~The Inviolate Realm
of Tarana [Sean Guarino, Joel
Green, Kyle MacLea]

 

[Summary of the leaders of the Inviolate Realm of Tarana
was written by Joel Green and Kyle
MacLea. The final wrap-up section was
written by Joel and Kyle and the entire summary was assembled by Kyle and
Joel.]

Addendum: The End of the Memoirs of
the Leader of the Wysos Expeditionary Force

 

As the runes on the strange monument approached zero and
whatever had emerged from the chambers on the Isle of Patterns reached us, the
reclusive wizard emerged from his house.
He intended to go down fighting with the rest of us. I may have found him strange and
uncooperative, but this I could respect.
At the same time, three wraithlike figures emerged from the undead horde
and approached the sea. As the giant,
four armed, amphibious humanoids emerged from the water, Joana parted the water from around them in
order to fully expose them. Our
offensive spells and missile weapons were largely ineffectual against these
creatures. I was certain that I would
die this day. The old wizard blasted
them with a mighty ball of fire that took out a few and fazed a handful of
others. But the turning point came when
the three wraiths, chanting in their archaic tongues, unleashed such
destruction that the old wizard’s efforts paled in comparison. A conflagration exploded in the midst of the
creatures, burning many of them. Then,
it seemed that the stars themselves rained down upon them, crushing and
incinerating

them. Those that
survived tried to escape to the sea, but were dispatched by the few of us who
could catch them and inflict harm on their foul bodies.

 

We awaited the attack of the undead, but were surprised when
a single skeleton advanced on us. It
started talking, and since we could not understand the words the old wizard
used his arcane arts to translate them.
The skeleton said: "You are
trespassing on the Inviolate Realm of Tarana.
Leave now, or be destroyed."
Thankful that our lives had been spared, we gave no argument and
immediately worked to escort those in the region that had survived to safety.

 

I realize, after all of this, that I am merely a mortal man,
imperfect and prone to mistakes. Even a
man as blessed as Konrad, with as much faith in him from his god as he has,
isn’t always certain what he is supposed to do. The gods must have a difficult time getting anything done using
us as their proxies. I do not know if
we could have done anything to stop the undead hordes of Tarana. Our presence
seems to have been so ineffectual. I
still don’t understand what actually took place by the sea at Towlmere. What were those creatures? Why did the wraiths destroy them and not
us? Why did the wraiths kill so many
people in the countryside, yet leave the survivors in the city alive? So many

questions, so few answers.
I hope that one day, Nevron will give me the wisdom to understand …

 

~~Captain Bernard
Mathou [written by Sean Paus with
minor editing by Kyle]

Addendum:
Sir Konrad’s Observations on the Last Days of Towlmere

 

After I had returned from the Isle of Patterns and at the
time when the distance counter on the strange monument had dropped to zero,
fifty 9 foot tall four-armed figures were emerging from the water. The Nevronian cleric Joana read Part Water from a scroll, completely
exposing the attackers as all the other spell casters opened up on the
creatures. Two shadowy figures emerged
from the ranks of the undead and cast flame spells of some type, the old man
from the keep cast a large fireball,
and soon the number of attackers was down to single digits. With the water level so low the remaining
invaders were easy to ride down and clean up – none escaped.

 

Once everything else had been finished, a skeletal figure
approached and informed all of us that the Inviolate Realm of Tarana had
returned and every living being must leave the area. We were able to lead the survivors out and back to the civilized
portions of Cromwell.

 

~~Sir Konrad [written by
Rodger Henson with minor editing by Kyle]

Addendum: Additional
Insight from Joana’s Perspective.

 

By Joana, Cleric of Nevron in the Wysos Expeditionary Force [played by Jay
Bates]

 

I was Joana, Nevronian Cleric in the Wysos Cromwellian
Expeditionary Force. I was essentially
third in command after Captain Bernard and Lieutenant Henri. Our mission was to
free 200 to 400 slaves from the clutches of drug lords in a manor house in the
woods southwest of The Watchtower. We also needed to burn the flowers and dump
the concentrated drug on sunlit ground. The 100 pound casks were worth 10kgp
each. The highly addictive drug rots the intestines in about three weeks.

 

About two hours before we started the game, Sir Konrad
arrived saying that he had been sent by Nevron to the area to stop as much suffering
as possible. We welcomed his help.

 

We decided to stop by The Hamilton to try to throw any spies
from the drug lords off our scent by asking about the haunted woods to the
north since our 70 troops and commanders. When the gateman got permission for a
couple of us to go in, Captain Bernard, Lieutenant Henri, and Sir Konrad
entered (to the gateman’s dismay at our math skills). They were only allowed to
speak to the staff, but a liquor supplier piped up that he had seen an
individual in Nevronian garb with a couple of prisoners and a squad of
hobgoblins in tow headed into the Haunted Woods. We also found out that about
25,000 people had headed west and then south away from the coming army, which
we suspect was a rumor spawned by the presence of our force and the previous
anti-drug force that had gone before us.

 

We headed north as if going to the Wood and camped a couple
of hours after dark. I rested and had enough time to switch to a Divination and a few other spells for
our assault. Just before I was awakened, the guards saw a blue light circling
like a lighthouse and then it swung high and low before finally vanishing.

 

About the time I was done with the 4kgp casting [of Divination] we got news from our flying
scout Pheraguat that the Drug Farm was overrun by a wraith and his spawn
(mostly the slaves and guards). Konrad also then got the impression that the
greatest need was southeast of our current position, so we decided to follow
him, but sent Pheraguat back to deal with the remaining plants and drugs. We
also decided that our squads of low level troops would just be fodder for
conversion to undead, so we sent them back east to Cromwell and we prceeded
back toward The Hamilton.

 

Many hours later, we were joined by another Cromwellian
Expeditionary force, this one from the Academy and they filled us in on some
details. We accompanied them to the city and I’m sure others will fill in those
details. My main contributions were a Weather
Control spell from scroll to try to clear the fog, a Lower Water to open the monument and a Part Water from the same Level 16 scroll to leave the Sahaugin high
and dry for the slaughter.

 

[Jay’s note: I had
realized the date within the first hour or so, since I have begun to record the
dates in my party calendars just for grins and giggles, which now seems to be
significant and we’ll see where Realms pop up. Balinor/Morty/Tarplin are a
couple of months past June 2192 and the BLADES are just into 2192.]

 

The results of my Divination
that was centered on The Watchtower before dawn (after the light and undead
attacks) in an area of 15-20 miles are given in the report of Captain
Bernard.

 

~~Joana [written by Jay with minor editing by Kyle]

Addendum: Additional Comments from
the Perspective of Taniqué

 

Did you never get a summary from our group? I can give you a vague synopsis, but I can’t
guarantee that it won’t be a little me-centric and filled with inaccuracy after
all this time.

 

I had always been the party leader for this party, and so
when we started up, I assumed that I was simply taking back on my role. A few had played their characters before
(Alan, Rhonda, and Ashley), but the others were just getting to know their
characters, and in one case (Lisette), the character was brand new. We chose a marching order and a guard shift,
neither of which ended up being of any use to us.

 

Ashley [playing Nygond the illusionist] had only five
seconds to decide whether to use his mirror of spell turning or not when
the Mad Prophet cast a stunning spell at us.
At his first chance, Ashley said, "Yes" which ended up
deciding the battle for us. Afterwards,
he [the Mad Prophet, the librarian who had reassembled the blue device on the
mountain] was completely out-of-it, and needed gentle handling, although he was
pretty much manhandled, sack-of-potatoes-like, for the rest of the game, as we
fled from the undead.

 

Of course, during all of this, blue undead fire was racing
its way to the top of the mountain along two channels along the side of the
steps. At the top, we found the apparatus
that the clerk had stolen, repaired and looking menacing.

 

(As a side note, Death from Above has almost always been
outgunned by whatever critter it was facing, as it has always been a government
investigative party, not a battle party.
As a result, running from danger was a given, and there was always
back-up if we decided that we needed it.
It gave the party a kind of a "not in the face!" battle
cry, and resulted in a bit of fatalism about our survival chances, and a lot of
careful trap-checking and paranoia. To
a party like that, anything that caused a mild-mannered clerk to go crazy and
do crazy things, even while sitting there not doing anything particularly
dangerous at the moment, looks menacing.)

 

The most exciting section was when we had to race to the top
and grab the collapsed clerk and the bound workers before the whole top section
lit up in blue undead fire (as was what happened when the channels reached the
top). Previously, MacKensie had volunteered
to drag the prone body of the clerk off the top. I remember Edwin counting down seconds as I instructed Kelvar and
Sigmund to get the other two workers with me.
We jumped off at the last minute just as we were all yelling for someone
(Tara) to throw the boat. We had a boat
token, and in a last-ditch effort to damage the apparatus at the top before
the fire reached it, someone threw the boat at it. The boat apparently aged in mid-flight, but did knock the
apparatus off-kilter, resulting in the weird skew to the blue light meant to
scan the horizon.

 

Well, we decided that the blue light had to go, no matter
the cost. If it had been menacing
before, it was definitely menacing now.
So we hatched the “flying illusionist with lead slab spell and dust of
making-things-real” plan [detailed in the Death from Above summary
and in Ashley’s further discussion below].
I wasn’t wild about the idea, as it seemed foolhardy, but we decided
that the blue light was really dangerous, and it had to go. So, to my surprise, it worked, the apparatus
was crushed, and the fire went out.

 

Well, our task had been to reacquire the apparatus and
clerk, one of which was accomplished, but the other of which now required
moving a large heavy iron slab. Well,
with many of our bright and talented minds working on it (including MacKensie’s
engineering skill) we managed to get it on the second try. We tossed it in its original crate (while
not touching it, even though it seemed completely inert now – still paranoid!)

 

Addendum: Additional Comments from
the Perspective of Nygond the Illusionist

 

I was with the Cromwellian crimestoppers Death from Above. My character was Nygond, the Illusionist
(level 5). I haven’t played Nygond for
about 12 years, but I do remember that he always seems to have the right spell
or item at just the right moment.
Nygond is close to 65 years old and rapidly approaching retirement as
the adventure begins.

 

We began with our group in hot pursuit of the fugitive
librarian from the Academy. He had
stolen some artifact from the Academy, but we had limited information about
what it was and what it could be used for.
During our hunt, we discovered that he was traveling with several
Hobgoblins (perhaps 5) and that he had kidnapped 3 skilled craftsmen along the
way. His trail led to this mysterious
mountain with stairs carved in the side extending to near the summit. We began to ascend the mountain and along the
way discovered periodic alcoves along the way with unusual carvings (I think
some kind of bas-relief). These
different alcoves showed a series of battles in various locales, including a
large scale outdoor battle, a battle inside a passageway involving a small
number of combatants and a large scale battle underwater. All but one of
these scenes involved a particular hero with an unusual spear-like weapon (I
think). Anyway, we weren’t sure what to
make of all of this so we kept climbing.
Soon enough we encountered the hobgoblins on their way back down. They claimed that the librarian had shown
them official documents allowing him to contract their services in the name of
Cromwell to apprehend certain individuals and provide escort. The librarian had access to the Royal Seal
so we figured they were probably telling the truth. The hobgoblins further volunteered that they were getting the
heck out of there because the librarian was acting fairly insane up near the
top of the mountain. We let them go on
their way and hastened our ascent.

 

We arrived almost at the top and found these chained-up
craftsmen who had been made to build a frame of some sort for the “crazy”
librarian. At this point, there were
troughs alongside the stairs leading up to the summit that were filled with an
eerie and nasty looking blue flame. We
surmised that the flames were similar to type of magical flame known to absorb
life-force. The flames were rapidly
advancing up the stairs. The nutty
librarian was here as well and he cackled something about being
invincible. As we came up on the guy,
he shot a beam of energy at the group.
Fortunately I had readied my trusty Mirror of Spell Reflection,
which happens to also work against spell-like innate powers. The beam was reflected back at the nutcase,
who was paralyzed by his own beam. This
was when we surmised that this old dude was being possessed or something
similar (He didn’t used to have god-like powers?!!)

 

The way was now clear, but we were too late to prevent the
flame from ascending to the top and engulfing the entire summit. The artifact that was stolen was on that
summit in a newly repaired (or newly assembled?) frame. When the flames reached it, the artifact
began to spin and cast out a beam of light like a lighthouse. We knew this couldn’t be good, but the
life-sucking flames kept us at bay. One
of our group had a portable boat, which he caused to materialize over
the artifact. The boat fell onto it,
but as it passed through the flames, the boat began to rot away in the
mysterious flames, such that the impact was not optimal. The boat drop succeeded in damaging the
beacon, causing it to wobble off of its intended axis. Obviously we needed something more
substantial.

 

While an illusionist with Phantasmal Force isn’t good
at destroying inanimate objects, he can create a large nifty illusionary slab
of lead hovering above the beacon. I
also had some hand Dust of Substance to make the illusion real. Someone cast a fly spell on me, but
either way, the dust was sprinkled and the lead slab made real. The slab then dropped onto the beacon
creating an explosion that nearly made my forthcoming retirement party
unnecessary, but I lived to tell the tale with some injuries from flying debris
(which was quickly healed).

 

So now the beacon was destroyed and the frame
flattened. It became obvious that
someone or something was meant to see the beacon and we didn’t want to be
caught on the scene so I went up flying as a lookout to see if anyone
was coming. We saw a large army far in
the distance but approaching. We
couldn’t tell much about them except for they looked pale white from this
distance. So, we picked up the slab,
salvaged the artifact and hightailed it out of there with the unconscious
librarian and the rescued craftsmen. As
we left the shadow of the mountain, we decided to get the heck out of there in
a hurry (as I continually advocated from this point on). We made our way south to a small resort [The
Hamilton] on the shore of the Salt Sea.
From the watchtower of the resort, we used a spyglass to spot a
Cromwellian army headed East, and we rode out to intercept them. They told us of a raid on slavers to the
West that had unexpectedly involved dangerous undead. Their officers had sent them out of harms way to get
reinforcements. We then headed out for
a fishing town [the City of Towlmere] on a causeway in the Sea to find
these officers.

 

We caught up to the officers, who told us of Spectres or
Shadows or some sort of undead that wiped out a mining camp full of
slavers. They were heading to the town
to find the famous Paladin, Sir Konrad who was in the area. Then there was of course the undead army,
the tunnel underwater, the Super-Sahuagin, the destruction of the obelisk and
the final climactic battle between mysterious forces. After all of this hubbub, I was only too happy to return to
Cromwell to begin my well deserved retirement.

 

Addendum: The Complete
After-Action Report of Pheraguat, Scout

 

Pheraguat,
as played by Andrew Anderson

 

AFTER ACTION REPORT

10-11 Jun 2192

Pheraguat, Elven woodsman, scout under the command of Cpt.
Bernard Mathou, Wysos Regulars, Cromwellian Expeditionary Force.

 

14 Jun 2192

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A Kraken agent lit a magical beacon to the sahaugin giant
bodyguards held in stasis on an inland sea island. The release of these Kraken guards, along with simultaneous
actions taken miles distant [see 8^th
Open synopsis], awoke the Inviolable Realms, including one in the region
into which our unit was dispatched on a counter-narcotics, counter-slavery
expedition.

 

By coincidence in the region of these events, the
Cromwellian army group under command of Cpt. Bernard Mathou, Wysos Regulars,
was successful in its mission to destroy the processed drugs, apparatus, and
fields. The slaver drug-dealers were
also destroyed, absorbed into the legions of the Inviolable Realm. Some of the slaves were also saved, and,
with local townsfolk, given safe passage east to Cromwell proper, by agreement
with the Inviolable Realm.

 

The emergence of the Inviolable Realms, and especially one
on the borders of Cromwell proper, poses serious threats, some not readily
apparent, but the long-term effect on the natural order may be more critical
than the mere presence of a powerful evil army stronghold on the borders. In the strictly military sense, there is
some hope for avoiding total open war in that we have a common enemy in the
Kraken. Some of the Kraken’s bodyguard
sahaugin certainly escaped. It was
unclear whether an actual Kraken was released by the beacon. We know that there is at least one mithril
mine in this Inviolable Realm’s domain.

 

All members of the Cromwellian party survived encountering
the Kraken’s sahaugin and the Inviolable Realm’s army, returning to their home
posts.

 

NARRATIVE

10 Jun 2192

 

Mounted on my hippogriff and armed with my bow, I was hired
to the serve as scout for the Wysos Regulars, Cromwellian Expeditionary Force…

 

[the Narrative is
included above and is not repeated here for brevity. The continuation of the Narrative for the second day of events is
recorded here for completeness.]

 

11 Jun 2192

 

… The guards posted throughout the city turned out to be
fodder for the undead army closing on the town from the peninsula. Few if any survived and none managed to
alert us to nearness of the danger to the north. While Konrad and I took to the air, the others boarded the ship
captain’s vessel. The undead followed
the boat but never overtook it, apparently by choice as they were clearly not
moving as fast as they could. On land,
too, the undead seemed willing to wait, keeping their distance until some
unknown signal. To the south, however,
breaking from the waves we could now see the greater sahaugin lords
emerging. This, apparently, was the
signal. The battle was joined.

 

The wizard/sage of the citadel did participate in the fight,
flinging fireballs at the sahaugin as we attacked the Kraken’s
lackeys. Konrad charged as he flew on
his pegasus, and I circled on my hippogriff firing arrows at the sahaugin.

 

Overwhelmed by the combination of forces waiting for them at
the waters edge, the sahaugin lords were defeated.

 

It was learned that the undead were legions of one of the
Inviolable Realms, sworn enemies of the Kraken. Luckily, mindless undead are not subject to the charming
and mind-effecting powers of the Kraken.
While we recognized that those present could not defeat the undead
armies or protect the citizens from them, the Inviolate Realms’ several
lich-lords also realized that doing combat with our force would have wasted
resources. No doubt, however, the
deciding factor was the unattractiveness of doing battle with a chosen champion
of Nevron, Konrad, would have been very costly for ultimately little gain –
there were few souls left to capture in the Krakens’ enraptured city. A parley was called and the Lord Konrad and
Cpt. Bernard Mathou made agreement with the Inviolable Realm to secure passage
for the townsfolk, themselves not guilty of their ancient ancestors falling
under the Krakens’ charm.

 

I was joyed to return to the slaves secreted in the mithril
mine and lead them under safe passage out of their captivity under the slavers
and keeping them from the worse fate of falling under the Inviolable Realm.

 

THREAT TO THE NATURAL ORDER

The rise of the Inviolable Realm so near Cromwell proper is
obviously of serious military concern, however, the Cromwellian government cannot
afford to overlook the threat posed to the natural world and the ecology, and
the risk that such damage will leach into Cromwell from this undead
stronghold. These corruptions of the
natural cycle of life, these perverted creations of twisted soul-less men, are
an abomination to the natural order. I
shudder to think what effect their presence will have on the land and beasts
under their sway. Although the undead
do not take active notice of the indigenous flora and fauna, their very
unnaturalness will surely have some negative effect. This effect will spread.
I urge the Cromwellian government to redouble its efforts to protect its
natural realm. The Strangers should be
aggressively expanded to assist in patrolling the border to watch for movements
and creeping invasions of perversity in the natural order. The Druids will certainly be active in the
New World, on guard for such threats.
Cromwell should make every effort to join efforts with the Druids and
others in these efforts.

 

[Kyle’s
note: It is my opinion that the
“Beacon” was not lit by an agent of the Kraken at all, but rather by an agent
opposed to the Kraken, who was interested in awakening the Inviolate
Realm. The awakening of the sahuagin
appears to have been precipitated by the Lower
Water of the explorers of
Towlmere, or possibly indirectly by the awakening of the Inviolate Realm. Still, I believe that the agent who
precipitated the whole thing was an anarchist, who are opposed to the Kraken
for the simple reason that the Kraken are the ultimate supernatural and
powerful agents of Martial Law. The
‘Mad Prophet’ who possessed Cromwell’s librarian did so to awaken the Inviolate
Realm and cause the eye of the Kraken to turn from Telvar, not to awaken the
sahuagin. That the sahuagin were
awakened was of little concern to the anarchist agent, as they would have
probably been dealt with, as they were, and would as such be one more tiny
injury to the Kraken power base on Telvar.
It is unclear if the Mad Prophet knew that the device was in actuality a
Warning and Scrying Device for determining the presence of the Kraken and their
agents, but it appears he did know that it would awaken the Realm. Regardless, Pheraguat’s assertion that a
pro-Kraken agent may have been responsible for the lighting of the Beacon is
also hard to disprove from the perspective of the knowledge available to the
Cromwellians and others at Towlmere after the battle against the sahuagin and
the ultimatum of the Inviolate Realm of Tarana. It is only with the knowledge of the Realm’s motivations and
composition that one can begin to put the pieces together.]