June 29-June 30 -
Sam the Iridiumite,
Siobhan Wrathburn,
Amaterasu
The party headed out southwards, seeking to explore the southern escarpment that others had spotted during their travels. They made their way past
Jernevar, where there were seemingly only a few undead still awakening and heading to work in the
Risen Mine, the majority having been put down by Perrin, Ladybird, Wags, and Sam previously.
They traveled down the road further south. The road continued east, deeper into the hills, but a fork went south, towards a broken bridge that once crossed the river. Seeing the ruins of the bridge, and the road heading south beyond, they decided to cross the river and continue towards the escarpment. Ammy wove a bridge out of reed, driftwood, and stone from the ruins, and the party crossed, though they could tell that the bridge wouldn't last very long once Ammy stopped concentrating on it.
Moving south, they spotted a chupacabra watching them from the sands, but it reconsidered attacking due to the fact that the only real prey it could spot was Siobhan and Marcus... with Ammy and Sam guarding them.
Continuing further, they found a waymarker labeled
Ainemark, and spotted the ruins of a town, with only three buildings standing mostly intact - a nordic stavechurch, a grecian temple, and a stone longhouse. The rest of the town - likely home to ~300 people when it was occupied - had been reduced to foundations and crumbling stone and mudbrick walls. Sam scanned the area with tremorsense, and detected a faint shifting coming from a direction that included the stavechurch and longhouse.
Investigating the stavechurch, they found a statue of Tir, which formerly had a silver hand, now long-since looted. The temple itself was without anything of value except for the bas-reliefs on the walls, which would require a great deal of effort to extract and transport back to Bridgetown. Sam scanned again with tremorsense, and detected another scraping sound from the direction of the nearby market square and the longhouse beyond it.
They sifted through the market square, which had been covered in silt, but found nothing of value. Sam, while using tremorsense to sift through the dirt, detected a sudden burst of movement from inside the longhouse in response to the vibrations he was creating. The group took a moment to buff up, and moved to investigate.
The longhouse was in remarkably good repair, with only a single hole in the roof, though it had sunk into the ground a bit, and the silt from floods of years past had piled up deeply. After poking their noses into the doorway, a figure burst out from behind a collapsed bookcase - a purple/green-skinned undead with pronounced fangs, inch-long talons, and a tentacular tongue.
After Sam immobilized the ghoul, and Siobhan charmed her, she simpered and whined, maddened with hunger, until the party fed her, first on jerky and then on a goat they hunted down. After she had fed, her insane ramblings became slightly more intelligible, and the party began to question her. While not all that they gathered could necessarily be trusted, what they were relative certain of was this:
The ghoul's name was
Sasgavek, and she had once been an orc of the
Wandermine Tribe, living in hills atop the escarpment near a city called
Rithnir Venz, where more orcs lived. She had been "chosen" by a ghoul named Garslov, who turned her. This was apparently supposed to be a
good thing, but then she got sick, and had to run away. She came to Ainemark because it was once a town, and should have a graveyard where she could feed, but there were only scraps of wet and moldy bones to be found in the ground here, and by that point she was too weak and slow to hunt any of the nearby fauna.
After getting all they could out of her, and well aware that the charm would wear off within a day, the party decided to put the poor thing down as mercifully as possible, and a blast of coherent radiation from Sam to the back of the head killed her without any chance to feel it. Then they buried her, with Sam digging the grave, Siobhan doing what rites she could, and Ammy growing a blanket of flowers over the grave.
The longhouse itself held a few gold and silver trinkets, and a logbook that seemed to be the journal of one of the town's mayors. It contained a number of historically interesting things:
- references to trade caravans coming north from "Malekar"
- the name "Halirgard" referring to the lands across the bridge to the west
- references to dwarven traders and craftsmen associated with a place called "Taigh'Mor"
- the word "Vechen" used to describe the nation(?) that Ainemark belonged to
- references to the "Magistrate of Jarnengat" as the person taxes were paid to
Investigating the grecian temple, they found a massive, badly rusted anvil and forge, and a series of bas-reliefs (some crafted in a classical human style, and others in a more dwarven style) dedicating the temple to Vulcan. Searching through it, they found little of surviving value - many rusted and decayed weapons, armor, and tools, but nothing that was worth more than its scrap or archaeological value.
However, Marcus (the cat) spotted a switch built into the base of the massive anvil, badly rusted but still capable of moving. While they couldn't manage to get it to activate without breaking, Sam summoned an earth elemental who swam through the stone floor and reported that a pipe (with, after poking a hole in it, a wire running through it) led to a hidden chamber beneath the center of the temple. The dug through the floor tiles, and found a storeroom with more stuff; while most of it was in a similar condition to the items left out in the temple above, a large pile of mithril ingots remained untouched by the ravages of time and water, which they were
very excited to find. Ammy put the pile into her pocket space, though this left very little room for Issun and the rest of her gear.
The sky was getting dark, so they decided to rest for the night inside the hidden storage chamber. Ammy spotted some goats warily wandering through town, which she fed with some of the grain she carries (though the goats didn't show any signs of thanks, the ungrateful louts). The night otherwise passed uneventfully.
In the morning, they decided to head across the bridge and south towards this orcish city of Rithnir Venz atop the escarpment. They spoke with the bridge's
Ampano'thea, which said that they were free to pass, and that there were "dead things standing watch," which although not reassuring wasn't entirely surprising.
Crossing over, the party saw the top of a monolith peaking above the hills in the west, but decided not to investigate and turned south along what remained of the track heading towards the escarpment. However, they soon spotted motion in the hills, and decided to investigate after whatever it was seemed to be keeping pace with them. They sent an earth elemental underground to spy on whatever it was, and it reported that there was a humanoid peaking over the top of the hill, who smelled of dust and death.
Ordering the elemental to keep whatever it was busy, the party rushed up the hill. Ammy got ahead of the rest, and immediately used vines to snare the figure, who was already being grappled from beneath by the earth elemental. After a bit of swordpoint diplomacy, they established that the figure - an undead human named Orvar - was a scout for "Jarl Sven's" family, and that he wasn't stupid enough to try to fight the group. (He also got very respectful when told that Ammy was a minor god, though the exact reasons weren't very clear.) Standing up, he - very carefully - tried to blow his horn, though Ammy transmuted a bundle of potpourri into it to stifle the sound. After being bewildered for a moment, Orvar explained that he needed to call for his superiors, so the party could either kill him or let him do his job.
After a brief huddle, they decided that they'd like to meet whoever was in charge here, and told him to do so. He dumped the remaining potpurri out of his horn, blew it, and they heard an answering horn call off amongst the barrows in the valley. The hilltop they were standing on was part of valley amongst the hills that cradled row upon row of barrow mounds, which Orvar said housed generations of the Svenson family. Atop one of the largest barrows, towards the eastern side of the valley, stood the monolith they'd spotted from the bridge.
Making small talk while they waited for Orvar's captain to arrive, they asked him what he was doing out of the grave (though they were more polite than that, thankfully). He explained that a necromancer had apparently tried to raise a Jarl named
Wulfgar some 12 or 13 years ago, who took exception to the disrespect shown towards the dead and chased the necromancer and his forces north of the Kevala River. Wulfgar then came south and awoke those amongst the barrows who were willing to be called back to life, and enlisted them in a war upon the necromancer and his forces. Orvar himself has only been awake for 6 years, standing watch over the barrows to ensure that the ghouls on the escarpment don't steal any more corpses from them. (Upon hearing that they'd put down a ghoul in Ainemark, he was visibly pleased, and went on a short rant about how awful ghouls were.)
When Sam asked about whether he or any of his people might know of a way to return home, Orvar scratched his head and said that one of the skalds who had been awakened, Svari Hatchethand, might be able to think of something.
Eventually his captain, Aleda Asmardottir, arrived. She was wary and visibly ready to attack if provoked, but eventually talked down and convinced that the party were there to help, and offered to send a messenger to Jarl Sven Olvirson, the patriarch who seemed to be in command of this group of undead, that a party of adventurers were offering their skills in the fight against the necromancers. She ordered her men to set up a camp for the outsiders, and told the party that if they left the camp and ventured into the barrows, she'd take it as a hostile act, but that they were welcome to stay as long as they behaved themselves.
And so, the party settled in, above a valley ruled by the walking dead, to await the arrival of an undead king.
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