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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron Sky" data-source="post: 7305130" data-attributes="member: 60965">IronDM Round 1 SubmissionThe Road to NowhereIngredients:Whistling WindMourning StarLawRoad to GloryShallow GraveImpasse The first adventure in a fantasy campaign.“The Veteran”: a PC whose backstory includes a battle they barely survived and strive to forget.Resting during a journey: a small church in ruins. Sunset casts rainbows through panes of spangled stained glass as sharp wind whistles through many-holed support beams. The Veteran's grim insight: this elemental faith is as extinct as the hillfolk who practiced it.Morning, the Veteran has vanished. Here signs of dragging, there a torn black veil, hoofprints.Flashback: the party passed through Hymwrought, a town memorable for its sturdy jailhouse and a sudden verbal assault upon the Veteran by a local, Gristlyn the Victor. Famous from her post-war speaking tour and recognizable from statues scattered across the realm, she was the sole survivor of the genocidal Hillwar's last battle a decade past. Once celebrated, now an incoherent stream of threats and harangues launched from within a swath of mourning blacks. Around her neck a ribbon bearing a polished gold Valor Star, one of its six points hacked off.Now: a hasty return to Hymwrought, the town astir. Gristlyn to be hanged at dawn! The Sheriff confirms; Gristlyn confessed to murdering the Veteran. The law is strict: murders hang at dawn – no exceptions. As kin and kind to the victim, however, the party has right of inquiry.Through iron bars Gristlyn whispers confession to the PCs alone – the Veteran lives... for now. Gleaning more is an arduous journey through the mind of a madwoman: guilt, shame, sorrow, vainglory, remorse, and bitterness woven with flashes of fury and weeping.They need time to get answers, but the Sheriff refuses leniency or delay: “The law is the law. She hangs at dawn.”Elsewhere, the Veteran awakens from a drugged stupor into a nightmare: the same cathedral where they once awoke buried alive in a heap of burned corpses. Now they lay in a shallow pit, piled under a suffocating heap of charred bones.Above, cathedral walls reach skyward, burned floors and gutted roof collapsed into the catacomb maze below. Fire-mangled apparitions roam the ruin fighting, arguing, wailing, writhing in spectral fire. Child-ghosts scream in endless terror. The only exit blocked: charred oak doors heaped with bones, ash, and rubble.The Veteran must survive exposure, hunger, and the dangerous wrath of unpredictable specters that berate, trick, torment, steal, and assault.GM note: cut back and forth between the cathedral and Hymwrought, making it clear the Veteran will eventually succumb if nothing is done.In Hymwrought, clues, the most important from each source in bold.Amidst Gristlyn's raving:    • She fingers the broken prong of her Star endlessly.    • She recognized the Veteran from the final battle.    • A mantra: “My beloved companions! They thought it better to make peace together. Peace is a lie so they all had to die.”• The Victim was interred “at the end of a road that goes nowhere”.Town rumor:    • Gristlyn has worn black since the war.    • The hillfolk faith was called the Pentiad and worshiped the five elements.     • The cathedrals were the last refuges for the 'folk, destroyed and the last 'folk with them. Fallen last: the Temple of Gales.• The final battle happened in the heart of haunted forest where shrill ghosts wail endlessly.     • The hillfolk died to the last child, the road to their now-empty lands useless and overgrown.Given access to Gristlyn's estate:    • A stallion ridden half-to-death.    • Invisibility and silence potions.    • Sleep-poison darts.    • A huge room containing only a torch and a wagon yoke.    • Heaps of faded posters announcing “Gristlyn the Hero's” next tour appearance.    • A crude map labeled “hidden catacomb entrance”.• Stands of flutewood saplings through which the wind whistles and moans like demented ghosts.Piecing things together: they must find and take the hill road, reach the haunted forest, then follow the shrill whistles of the flutewood groves at its heart wherein the Cathedral of Gales molders. The five-pointed star atop its steeple lies jutting from the underbrush while barricaded against the doors sits a rotting wagon packed with empty oil jars. On the wagon bench, the broken-off point of a gold star.Once inside the party must rescue the Veteran; words of Gristlyn's immanent death will do much to sooth and smooth their passage. Otherwise, the fury of the dead.Gristlyn's final words: “Exult the hero – she who does willingly that which she will lament until her death.”</blockquote>

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