The Recovery of the Peldaramen City Archives

Discovery, Exploration

Ciaran Kelham hires a group of mercenaries to help him retrieve a lost imaging drone within the recently discovered ruins of Peldaramen, a dwarven city thought to be long-lost. These mercenaries discover a trove of information about late dwarven history and culture.

In Crestmark of 2468, a research team from Andervane University uncovered a long-lost secret entrance into the underground ruins of Peldaramen, an ancient dwarven city located beneath the town of Harich in the Emberleaf Republic. Ciaran Kelham was assigned to lead the effort of studying the place. However, Peldaramen was vast, with the ruins stretching deep underground for miles. Time had worn sections of the city away and rendered them unreachable, but even the parts that remained were much too large to survey on foot. Many of the imaging drones that his team used worked fine, but one of them accidentally reactivated the city's security and was damaged beyond the explored zone. Kelham hired a group of mercenaries to escort him to the drone's last location, where they fought skeletons reanimated by wild magic surges that still lingered nearly 3,000 years after the cataclysm that triggered them. They recovered the drone, as well as a cache of data stored on the city's strange equivalent to computers.   Unbeknownst to the university's team, the mercenaries encountered Oriantha of Zavrandur, the artificial intelligence who oversaw the city's affairs before its destruction. The party saved her life after she was injured trying to shut down the reanimated security systems. Oriantha, upon learning that there were no dwarves left to protect, deleted all records of her or any of her predecessor AIs existences from the city's archives before leaving it with the mercenaries. She went off to find her new path in life, and promised that she would cross paths with them again. The party did not disclose this encounter with Kelham.