Chapter 02

General Summary

Chasing Down Answers

Exhausted after a night and full day of assisting the people of Hillside Slope recover from the tragic impact of Skyfarers’ Guild airship, the Horizon, our heroes are starting to get to know one another. Sharing a meal in the common area of the village, along with many of the villagers and the crew of the Horizon, our heroes are taken by surprise when monsters storm in, intent on brutal violence…

Unwelcome Guests (part 2)

• Four Ogriar rush the common area, killing randomly before our heroes can react.
• With nearly depleted resources, our heroes leap to defend the village.
• DeClain feels the might of the Oriar and is almost killed.
• After an intense melee, the heroes are able to dispatch the Ogriar. On the Ogriar they find the beasts equipped with chain shirts and greatswords. No heraldry is found on the armor or weapons. The items are crudely made.
• After the common area is secured, a high-pitched metallic screech is heard and other Ogriar further away are spotted retreating to the west.
• A runner from the Horizon is enters the common area, asking for a healer. The Horizon’s captain was attacked and is nearly dead.
• Smiling over the irony of boarding the airship after she’d just been banished from it, Midgwyn follows our heroes as they seek to help the captain.
• Stabilized, the captain reveals in a weak voice that the engine room was attacked by several Ogriar, led by a Gräuel (an eyeless creature of darkness). The Gräuel stole the airship’s Heartstone.
• The First Mate takes Zafaris aside and informs her that most of the airship’s guards fell in the attack. Those that remain must stay with the airship and offer what protection and security they can. In this context, Skyborne Zafaris is instructed to assemble a team to track down and retake the Heartstone. Without it, the Horizon will never fly again.

The Search Begins

• Offering coin, Zafaris convinces the adventurers she’s only recently met to join her in tracking down the Heartstone. The heroes get some much-needed rest and head out the next morning.
• On the way out of the village, Old Man Tibbles (a wizened figure with a beard like tangled roots) meets them and warns them that their quarry already has a good lead on them. He tracked them to their path into the village. The Ogriar, at least a dozen, headed south, but came from the north.
• When the heroes find the tracks, they confirm Tibbles’ assessment and decide to head north in hopes of discovering where the Ogriar came from. Maiya, a druid by trade, follows the tracks northward easily, even making educated guesses that speed the party’s pace, turning a full day’s journey into only a half-day.
• They arrive just after midday to discover a single weathered stone column, canted to one side with its tips broken and the pieces laying at its base. The column, only three feet high and a foot in width, has ancient arcane writing along its base and what remains of the tip. The script is indecipherable to the party, but Midgwyn takes a charcoal rubbing of its surface anyway. Surrounding the column is tamped-down grass with only one trail leading away: the one the heroes themselves followed to the column.
• Theorizing that the Ogriar probably teleported here, but unable to determine from where they originated, the party turns southward and continues tracking.
• The next day the tracks become difficult to follow and the party loses some precious time.
• About midday the party discovers the corpses of several Ogriar and a pack of wolves feasting on them. A giant white wolf, the size of a horse, watches the party as they approach. Le'otie steps closer, trying to communicate at a ridimentary level with the alpha wolf when she collapses. As startling vision wracks her mind. The giant wolf approaches her, sniffs her, then huffs. The pack abandons their meal and runs to the treeline. The white wolf saunters away. When Le'otie comes to, she reports a series of images where she and the white wolf were battling armies, some made up of Ogriar, some not. The details were difficult to understand, but the white wolf was by her side in every scene.
• Later that evening, the heroes run across a ransacked farmstead. The animals are all dead, slaughtered by Ogriar, but the owners of the homestead are nowhere to be found. Only a silhouette of a man burned into the side of the barn remains.

Rogues Have Nine Lives…

• Three days after they began their quest, the party finds the Ogriar, just shy of a dozen, camped out in from of a cave in the foothills of the Mountains of the Sun. The Gräuel leading them paces before the entrance to the cave.
• Midgwyn and Maiya (wild-shaped into a rat and tucked into the rogue’s pocket) decide to get closer.
• The rest of the party watch in horror as the captured farmers captured the previous day are slaughtered and eaten.
• The Gräuel commands three of the Ogriar to enter the cave. Not long after they enter cries of pain and fear echo out and are suddenly swallowed whole.
• After watching the Gräuel for a time, Midgwyn decides to try her luck sneaking past the creature. Her luck, however doesn’t hold, and the Gräuel spots her. Screeching to the rest of the Ogriar, the Gräuel and its minions chase after Midgwyn as she races into the cave.
• The rest of the heroes follow quickly after and are surprised by a fast-moving underground river not far inside the cave mouth. DeClain is unable to keep himself from falling in.
• Across the river, only two of the Ogriar successfully leaped to the rest of the cave proper. The Gräuel also manages the leap and quickly spots and approaches where Midgwyn is hiding. The rogue highlights the Gräuel with faerie fire before succumbing to the mind-numbing fear the dark-cloaked creature imparts.
• A battle ensues between the remaining Ogriar, Gräuel, and our heroes. Partway into the combat four giant spiders appear and attack whoever is closest to them. This works both for and against the heroes as the spiders distract the Ogriar, however Maiya goes down.
• DeClain, realizing he probably cannot beat the Gräuel in combat, devises a clever but risky plan to use his grappling hook to entangle the Gräuel and one of the hulking Ogriar together. Working with his fellow adventurers, the plan works and DeClain pushes the Ogriar into the river. The Gräuel is hauled into the river as well, giving the heroes a few precious moments to finish off the spiders before having to confront their quarry again.
• The Gräuel does not give up easily, disentangling itself from the grappling hook and jumping onto the shore. Fortunately, with the spiders dispatched, the weakened Gräuel (who cannot disappear due to Midgewyn’s faerie fire) is taken down.

A New Objective

• Having recovered the Heartstone, the party is curious as to why the Gräuel led the Ogriar to this cave and what it needed with the Heartstone in the first place. They quickly discover stairs at the back of the cave and decide to follow them.
• The heroes quickly discover a chamber filled with an anti-magic effect. Four Ogriar lay in a heap, dead but with no visible wounds. DeClain theorizes that the Ogriar, being created by The Maeg Anri, might be magical creatures and could not sustain themselves in this chamber.
• The party separates momentarily as Midgwyn finds a hidden entrance to the room full of spiderwebs. She insists on going down the passageway to see what there is to see while most of the rest of the party scouts ahead.
• After discovering an easily bypassed trapped hallway, the party reunites and emerges from the cave into a small hidden valley. A wooden manor greets them with a stone chapel to the side. In front of them an earth elemental rises and confronts them.

Report Date

28 Jul 2024