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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seasong" data-source="post: 987721" data-attributes="member: 5137">Incidentally, some notes on Uggrahd itself.I wanted a really big mountain, so I made it a flat 10 miles high, with the first three miles being the usual 30-60 degree slopes a person might expect to see, and the remainder sloping sharply upward into something closer to an approximation of a slowly narrowing pillar punching upward through the sky. The upper third of the mountain is near-vertical, narrowing by a few feet every 5-10 yards, with occasional ledges and cracks to rest on and in.Careful climbing is about half a mile per hour, and is exhausting work. An hour of climbing can utterly exhaust the uninitiated, and while the climbing group consisted of life-hardened people, they were still prone to wearing out.Walking and scrambling up to the part where it got hard took half of the day, and the remainder of the first day was spent learning how to climb Uggrahd - they didn't even get half way up.The second day, after careful camping and watches on one of the larger ledges they'd found, they made better time. Although exhaustion and dizziness had set in only a few hours into the climb, they'd reached the upper third ofUggrahd, and climbed a total of 3 miles into the atmosphere.Looking from that height, more than a mile above the next tallest mountain in the area, must have been really thrilling for most of them, and especially Bellos. And they likely took a good long while looking at it, because if they stopped looking at it, they had to consider that the hardest part was yet to come.The hardest part took them all of a day, and several rest stops, just to hit the cloud layer. Here, Xeras' suspected influence was most evident, as occasional lightning flashes would roll through the thunderhead clouds surrounding Uggrahd.Looking down, the rest of the world became hazy and indistinct, seen through a sea of fog. It was at this point that they discovered the natural chimney.Brief geekdom note: I like transformative stages, afterlife imagery, etc., particularly in an event as innately spiritual as climbing Uggrahd was meant to be. Tunnels (and caves, and going down into either to seek wisdom) is a time-honored tradition, especially done right. I tried <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.Climbing up through the chimney, it became pitch black, and out of slight paranoia, Greppa wouldn't use his Allas-touched light spells. He wasn't sure he wanted her to know what he was doing.So they climbed in the dark, amidst stone more ancient than their entire civilization. Perhaps they imagined a heartbeat at the center of the mountain. Perhaps they heard nothing.After too long in the dark, a crack of light was visible ahead. And, long minutes later, had grown into an opening.When they stepped out, there was only a little ways left to climb, perhaps a half-hour's worth... and the land was invisible, hidden by a vast, strange landscape of dark clouds.They climbed to the top.</blockquote>

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