In Search of Past Legends

[Kerrick]

From the journal of Mirabeth the ranger:

Today marks our first day of freedom from the Lich King Army. I'm not sure now why I joined them, but it seemed a good idea at the time. I guess it was a chance to get away from my home village – they never really cared about me anyway, and the recruiter said they didn't care if I were mute, as long as I could do my job and communicate in an intelligent fashion.

So I thought military service wouldn't be so bad... but I was wrong. The atrocities they committed... I like to think I have a strong stomach, that I can handle almost anything, but the things I saw and heard about were went far beyond what I could handle. Fortunately, I was not alone – there were a few others like me, and together we planned an escape, grabbing what we could from stores and making off with our loot.

Much of that night and the next is a blur; I know we stopped in Tavek-Eck and hit the taverns with some of the gold we had stolen. I didn't drink much, and neither did the cleric or the two elves, but some of the others got totally smashed – the vallendre sorcerer was flying loop-the-loops through the rafters (half-naked, or course) while sending sparks and dancing lights all over the place, and the bard was singing off-color (and off-key) Lich King drinking songs, including "Eck the Impotent and the Milkmaids." That was what got us thrown in jail for the night – apparently singing songs about Eck the Anvil in a town that was once under his control (and still bore his name) was frowned upon.

So, after a night in jail to sober us up, we were thrown out onto the street and told never to come back. Fine with me – there were plenty more towns that were more hospitable.

There was one, in fact, a day's walk to the south, with a nice little inn. One of the elves decided to spend the night in the church, the savage (a strange character, he is; I'll get to him later) disappeared muttering something about sleeping under the stars, and the rest of us went to the inn.

Where the bard and the vallendre proceeded to sing bawdy songs and do a striptease routine, respectively, to pay for their rooms. I'm seriously beginning to wonder about the wisdom of accompanying these people...

But at least they didn't get drunk and tear the place up this time. When I came down the next morning, the savage (he really is a savage type – he uses rocks and a greatclub) was staring out the window and muttering "They're out there... they're out there." Who "they" were, he wouldn't say. The vallendre was looking behind the bar for some whiskey, but at least the bard wasn't singing.

We ate a relatively normal breakfast, got our gear together and, after a short debate about getting horses, decided to walk. And so we set off south, toward Novak Eck. Initially we had heard that Gor DuMay, leader of the Stygian Wave, was gathering thousands of mercenaries there, so we didn't want to go anywhere near the place – we were deserters, after all. But they left the next day, along with most of the mercenaries in the city, leaving a huge vacuum – an ideal opportunity for a few adventurers like ourselves to make some money.
It was also an ideal opportunity for every bandit between here and Novak Eck to waylay travellers, it would seem. In our case, it was a trio of harpies. We dealt with two of them easily, but the third fled into the forest nearby before we could catch her. So we, being the brave adventurers we were, gave chase.

We were well into the forest, myself and the savage in the lead, when I noticed something – the woods were silent. Not a bird chirped, not an animal moved through the brush. And, up ahead, a clearing – an ideal place for an ambush. I signalled for the savage to go right, while I went left. I'll have to give the vallendre one thing – she might have had breasts the size of her head and not much between her ears, but she had guts. She flew out into the clearing to set off the ambush and get the attention of the ambushers. Too bad for her she wasn't fast enough – three arrows shot her down, but one of the elves ran out after her and brought her back.

Meanwhile, I was ghosting around the left side of the clearing. I quickly found and dispatched the first of the ambushers – a man-sized humanoid with orangish skin, a blue nose, and porcine features. I wasn't sure what it was – it wasn't an orc or goblin – but it died easily enough, and that was good enough for me. I made my way around the edge of the clearing, dropping five more along the way; at one point I caught sight of the savage on the other side felling another with a rock. We met on the far side of the clearing, having made short work of the creatures, and discovered a path leading deeper into the forest. So we, being the brave adventurers we were and wishing to complete the job, followed the path.

Which led us straight to a village of the things. The harpy we had nearly killed earlier was in the middle of the village talking to a man with a snout and a tail – some sort of half-breed, it looked like.

At this point, I must admit that I got a bit overeager. While the savage went back to warn the others, I went ahead and let fly with an arrow at the harpy. I had nearly killed her before, and I wanted to finish the job. My first shot hit, but it drew the attention of everyone in the village. I moved off to the right this time, firing arrows and moving. The large human (?) immediately started shifting into a large rat, while the harpy attempted to take to the air, but I and a few couple of the others put her down quickly, before she started singing.

From there it devolved into a blur of in-close fighting In the forest; several of the creatures (hobgoblins, I later learned) charged my position, and I was forced into melee with them, but the monk came up and gave me a hand; between the two of us, we managed to kill them all without suffering any harm.

While this was going on, our friends were apparently wreaking havoc of their own; a tent on the other side of the village exploded in a large fireball, and a minute or so later, the large house in the center of the village went up in a roar of flames and exploding kindling. It turns out the party's cleric charged into the house, catching the hobgoblin shaman off-guard and snatching his wand of fireballs, which she used to destroy the house and kill everyone inside. The rat-man got away, unfortunately, but he left a blood trail that was quite easy to follow for a skilled tracker.

I won't bother detailing the chase; it was a long, exhausting run over 100 miles of terrain, from forest to plains into the mountains. The road started up several switchbacks, which had been carved into the side of the mountain, and we found waymarkers that said an outpost of some kind was up ahead. Good for him, bad for us – if he got to the outpost before us and it was still in operation, we would lose him.

We redoubled our pace and finally caught up to him halfway up the mountain, among the rubble of past fighting. We hacked him down, cut off his head, and burned the body to make sure he was dead, then fell dead asleep where we stood from exhaustion.

When we awoke, it was sometime the next morning. We had been out for around 15 hours, but we felt much better for it. In his things, we discovered a few interesting items: a receipt for a block and tackle, four mule-driven winches (and the mules to operate them), several long steel bars and lengths of chain, a block and tackle, stone saws, and chisels. And, most interesting of all, a gem carved into the shape of a dwarven rune of some sort.

After some discussion, we decided to keep going up the mountain to the outpost, see what was there, and see what the rat-man was up to. The road was littlered with the remnants of fierce fighting – old living war machines, cairns of the fallen, blasted and cracked stone from spells, and the corpses of giants were only some of the things we saw. Near the top, we had to climb over berm after reinforced berm that had been built by the advancing army; whatever had been (or still was) up here, it had apparently be important and well-defended.

We soon reached the top of the mountain – a large level space – and saw that the road turned abruptly and went into a gap in the cliff. The gap opened onto a broad valley, perhaps a half-mile wide and a mile long, filled with trenches, more rubble, more corpses, and caves riddling the mountainside. After seeing a large trail of blood leading out of (or perhaps into) one cave, we decided entering them was probably a bad idea. A small waterfall fed into a lake near the other end of the valley, and in the middle of the lake was an island with ruins on it – an outpost destroyed in the fighting, most likely.

Off on the other end of the valley, we saw a group of ogres, more hobgoblins, and a single human laboring to cut and haul pieces of stone from the side of the mountain. Why, we had no idea, but we were determined to find out. So, we crept up through the trenches until we could get close enough to eavesdrop on them. What we heard was very interesting – they were waiting for someone named Apok, and they also mentioned Marktik Van – an ancient dwarven stronghold supposedly overrun and destroyed during the First Lich King War, and the richest mine ever created on Shtar.

If it were true – and the bard said that it could be, based on some stories he had heard – then all we had to do was wait for this crew to finish clearing the gate, then kill them all and take the loot.

Our luck got even better when one of them found the remains of someone they had sent before to open the gate, crushed under the stone; included in his things was a book that none of them could read, so one of the ogres flung it over the ledge, down to near where we were hiding. The savage ran out to get it and brought it back. It was written in dwarvish, but the half-dwarf monk could read it, with some effort; he translated it for the bard, who combined it with some other accounts he had and came up with reasonable evidence that this was, in fact, Marktik Van.

According to the tales, IV, Gor DuMay, and one of the Stygian Legions attacked the fortress from above, while a horde of demons appeared in the lower levels and started slaughtering everyone they found below. Beleaguered and besieged, the defends nonetheless managed to keep the armies from getting in wholesale – elements got through here and there, and the fighting was fierce, but they sealed the vault, as well as several of the gates leading into the fortress, leaving only one intact. Which one that was, however, was lost to the mists of time. Not even the bards agreed on how many gates there were along the surviving path – from the accounts we had, there could be anywhere from one more to seven more. We also found out the gem-rune was a key to the gate. Where Apok had gotten it, we had no idea, but now we had it.

Our luck further improved when the ogre/hobgoblin crew pulled the last block away from the door the next day, just before noon. The others had concocted a plan to pose as mercenaries hired by Apok and sent here to aid them in clearing the gate. In this guise, went up to the gate and passed ourselves off; we even showed them the key Apok had supposedly given us. It turned out there were two more keys – one blue, and one green (ours was red) – one for each of the moons – but we only needed the blue and the red ones. The gate ground open...

And a huge beast, filled full of arrows but still moving, met us on the other side. A voice spoke in our heads: "I will kill all of you and grind your bones to dust," then it attacked. The hobgoblins fell first under a cloud of ice, while the rest of us lay into it with swords, axes, rocks, and arrows. The ogres and human went down under a barrage of mind blasts and trampling, but after a long bitter struggle, we killed the thing.

I'm writing this now as we camp near the body. We plan on pushing past this second gate on the morrow, but for now, we'll rest, heal up, and make plans. Marktik Van – the single largest, richest mine on the face of Shtar – and we, a group of deserters from the Lich King Army, would be the first people to set foot inside it in nearly 700 years. It boggles the mind, to think what we could find down there.

Or what could find us.

 

[Kerrick]

From the journal of Mirabeth the ranger:
The third gate turned out to be easy to pass, much more so than the second - it was blown inward, probably by a huge battering ram. It led to another valley, bigger than the first; a river drained from another lake in the northeast corner, wound across the valley, and disappeared into the rock near the south gate. Anohter island stood in this lake too, also with ruined buildings on it. Unlike the first valley, this one didn't have trenches; instead it held fortifications - old ones, too. It looked like the defenders had fought a holding action here, but had slowly been pushed back. A road led from the south gate through gaps cut through the fortifications (again, old work, probably done by the attacking army) to the other gate.
The first thing that struck me was that the valley was dead silent - I could hear nothing but the wind whispering through the grass. It almost felt like we had stepped into a tomb, except the place was open to the sky.
We slowly made our way along the road, while the vallendre flew over to the island to investigate the ruins. She rejoined us near the other gate, having found nothing of real interest.
The fourth gate was big – 80 feet wide, and 50 feet tall. Dwarven runes, badly weathered, had been carved across the doors. The only thing we could make out were the runes for "ocean," "volcano," and "forest." The cleric quickly determined that this probably meant we needed the blue key, and inserted it into the lock, then turned it.
There came a loud grindning noise from the gate, and we all took an involuntary step back, thinking of the mage whose book the bard carried in his pack. Luck was with us, however - the gates were slowly grinding open. Time and war had taken their toll, however; the right-hand door ground to a stop about halfway, then fell slightly aslant with a loud CHUNK. The left-hand door, by default, stopped too, but the gap was still 30 feet, wide enough for a platoon of soldiers to ride abreast.
The tunnel beyond was large, easily 100 feet wide and 150 feet high. Cliff dwellings lined the walls of this tunnel, too, and openings led off at varying heights into the rock of the mountain.
There was only one entrance at groud level, so of course we started there. A short tunnel led into the rock to a small room, and in the room, two human-size figures moved toward us with the clanking of metal. They advanced into the light, and we saw that they were suits of armor - old, rusted, and worn, with nothing in them but two points of red light.
I won't go into the details of the fighting; it was fierce, despite the obvious age of our opponents, and we very nearly didn't win. If it weren't for the vallendre hovering behind us with a wand of cure wounds, our bodies would likely still be there. As it was, though, we survived and won.
We soon discovered what the creatures had been guarding, for there could be no other reason they were still there after such a long time - crates, rotted and broken after all this time, lined the walls, and within them... ingots of pig iron, stamped with the rune of the dead Marktik Van dwarf clan. Here, in this room, was enough money to make us wealthy for a long time. We spent nearly an hour transferring ingots to the cart, then we turned our attention to the exit from the room, another passage that led further into the rock.
A few turns later, we ended up in another room inhabited by a pair of long-dead dwarves with metal plates bolted to their bodies, who rose to greet us. The cleric, with his hammer, came in handy at this point, as my arrows were doing very little damage to them. He blasted the things down with but a few swings.
This room held a number of locked, but empty, chests, as well as a rack of shortswords (also locked, unfortunately). It appeared the Stygian Wave had taken these caves and used them for storage, placing their guards here.
I won't go into detail abput the rest of the area, in order to save space; suffice it to say that all the caves here were being used for storage, and all of them were guarded by suits of armor, zombies, and - in one case - a large creature made from chains. That was a fierce fight, which we very nearly lost, but it was worth it - the creature was guarding an iron coffin with the body of an important dwarf inside it. We also turned up several disassembled siege engines - portable towers, a movable fortress (a big turtle-shell with a neck that soldiers could hide under) and portable rams. We took one each of the towers and fortresses, thinking they might come in handy sooner or later.
Near the far gate, we encountered a group of wraiths, former soldiers of the Stygian Wave. We killed the lesser ones, and the leader decided to parlay - information in exchange for his unlife. The information he had was worth it - it turned out that what we had thought were the gates mentioned in the legend weren't the gates at all - the tunnels themselves were the gates. Which meant we had another six tunnels to go through.
On the plus side, he told us that in order to get through the far end of the third gate, we had to go back to the first valley and retrieve a block of stone from the citadel, then take it back to the third gate, place the keys in it, and open the doors.
So we returned to the first valley and retrieved the stone from the tower. We were about halfway back across the causeway when we were attacked by a gigantic squid. Things were looking rather bleak (it had grabbed half the party in its tentacles), but the paladin threw his greataxe at the creature's eye, which was just under the surface of the water, scoring a hit. The creature immediately let us go and fled into the depths.
It's getting near dark now, so we're going to stay the night here and haul the slab out to the third gate in the morning. We have no idea what to exepct in the valley beyond, but having the siege engines makes us confident that we can face most threats.

 

[Kerrick]

From the journal of Kyra the rogue:
I'm writing this as we take a break about halfway up the mountain, after spending the better part of a day creating a ramp to climb up a sheer cliff face. If we weren't being promised wealth beyond our wildest dreams, I scarcely would have considered this to be worth it. We were, though, so here we sit, sweaty and tired.
Did I mention we were promised wealth beyond our wildest dreams? I thought I did. Some mercenaries, friends of ours we had gone drinking with in Tavek-Eck, sent a homing pigeon back to us.with a message: "Gather together enough equipment for a long underground expedition into a huge dwarven fortress." Accompanying it was a map which led to the dwarven city of Marktik-Van, a place which everyone knew had been sealed for nearly 700 years. And which everyone knew was the largest and richest mine in the world. If our friends had actually found a way inside, like they claimed... this would make our careers.
So we spent the next few days buying up supplies for an extended underground expedition – wagons, mules, dungeoneering equipment, food, pigs, oxen, and chickens, etc. etc. When we were done, we were very nearly broke and we looked like we were leading a trading caravan, but we had everything we could possibly think we needed.
It looks like we're going to get moving, so I'll continue this later.

It's the next day, and we finally reached the first valley. There's an encampment near the gate, and it looks like someone's been there recently, but no one's there now. While we waited for our friends, we spent the time unloading equipment and setting up camp. The only notable event that occurred was that something (we think it was a squid, but it had to have had arms nearly 100 feet long) reached up out of the water and tried to snatch one of the oxen. We beat it back and decided to move the camp away from the water. I wonder if our friends fell victim to the squid... but their gear would still be here, and there's nothing here beyond the basic stuff you'd see in a camp.
The first part of the night passed uneventfully; the blackguard was on watch around the middle of the night when the squid actually pulled itself out of the water (or so he said) and crawled across the ground toward the camp where we had moved it about a quarter-mile away. Of course, he also said the thing's head was plated in armor and it had eyes all around the head, except for one that had a greataxe sticking out of it. He drove it off by shooting an arrow at it - apparently it was wary of sharp objects near its eyes. The next person on watch reported that it kept peeking out of the water, but it remained IN the water.
Nevertheless, we moved the camp into the first gate the next day. The second night, the blackguard again reported something strange - someone banging on the gate, followed by various attempts to get us to open up, like "It's Droog - I've got the gear you requested!" and "Ahh! Open the gate!" Fortunately, the blackguard and the psychic warrior (who was next on watch) didn't fall for such a simple ruse. We concluded that, given the circumstances, the thing could only be a Horror of War, one of the living war machines left over from the Elder God War.
The first two gates were empty – we saw no sign of our friends. In the third gate, however, someone had written "Siege Equipment Here" in chalk on the wall, pointing up to the cavern where it was stored. How nice of them.
Now armed with a siege tower and a portable fortress, we passed through the far end of the third gate. The valley was blocked by a large castle wall, complete with towers, crenellations, and a huge gate. Parts of the wall had been breached, the gate had been smashed, and skeletons still hung over the walls or lay on the ground where the defenders had been killed. We found our friends' tracks heading toward a gap to the right of the main gate, so we followed them, leaving the majority of the equipment behind while we scouted ahead.
The first thing we saw as we passed over the gap was a siege tower and a fortress like ours, both hacked to pieces and burned. No bodies, though; maybe our friends had escaped and fled deeper into the valley. A second wall, five times as high as the first, blocked access to the rest of the valley. This one had not breached, that we could see, but a broad stone bridge led across a deep moat to a gate in the wall.
No sooner had we gotten over the gap than a hail of what we assumed were arrows bounced off the metal plates of the turtle shell. We immediately spotted the archers - they were firing from slits in the towers in the wall behind us. We wheeled the fortress around and linked it up with the doorway of the tower, then waited for the soldiers inside to come to us.
And come they did, eventually - skeletal infantry with pikes and tower shields. We dealt with them easily, since they could only come at us one at a time. The party's blackguard then charged down the passage into the tower room, bulling into a trio of skeletons with tower shields guarding a mage. The rest of us followed, and we hacked apart them and some archers that dropped through a hole in the ceiling. There was blood splattered liberally about the place, but no bodies - apparently our friends had fallen foul of these undead soldiers, but their bodies were nowhere to be found. We could only hope they hadn't been raised also.
We went on through the tower, hacking down defenders when we encountered them. We eventually found our friends' bodies and used some of the scrolls of resurrection we had bought on them. Then, together, everyone finished clearing the tower and ambushed a group of skeletons who had circled around and were attempting to destroy the fortress.
After that, we retreated back to the second gate and made camp, where our friends filled us in on what had happened. They had hauled the slab up to the third gate, where they discovered that a large part of the chain used to open the gates was missing. Fortunately, they had enough chain to bridge the gap, so they hooked it up and opened the gate with the slab and keys. They hadn't been as prepared as we were when passing through the breach in the wall, though - they had been caught from behind by the archers, who had shot most of the party down; two of them had fallen near the doorway to the tower, where they had charged the defenders.
Tomorrow, they plan on moving over the bridge and leaving us in reserve to keep an eye on things; if they're not back in a day or two, we're to go find them and rescue them (again). I don't know that I appreciate being relegated to search and rescue, but given that they're suffering most of the risk and we still get a fair amount of treasure, I guess it all balances out in the end.

Yes, that's right kids - TOTAL PARTY WIPEOUT! We walked right into it, and we got ripped apart.

Along with the journal, Ralts (the DM) will be posting maps of the area, writeups of the characters we're using, and writeups for some of the original monsters we face. Stay tuned for more!