MMAgCh fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 26, 2009

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Clanpot Shake fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Mar 15, 2010

MMAgCh fucked around with this message at 19:54 on May 3, 2010

• The world of Noremien appears to be spiralling towards disaster: some three months ago, following an eclipse that caught even the most learned scholars by surprise, all connections to the gods and other planes were apparently severed, and the eladrin city of Deepwreathe crossed the planar boundaries no more. Almost more grievously, those commanding any kind of supernatural powers, be they arcane, divine or primal, grow fewer in number every day, somehow entirely losing these abilities for reasons thus far unknown. Additionally, strange intruders have been spotted all over the world, mysterious monsters and creatures that somehow appear in Noremien, wreak havoc for a short amount of time, and then vanish again.
  
• You were asked by Ravic Carthaune, archmage of the prestigious Academy of the Lake, to locate Tolarius, a reclusive warlock and former Academy member who he believed may have an explanation for the Eclipse and the subsequent strange events and incidents in Noremien. Tolarius was due to visit the Academy several weeks earlier to meet with Carthaune and share his findings on this very subject, but he never arrived and was not heard of since. His last known whereabouts were an ancient tower in the Everleaf forest, which he claimed as his home years ago.
  
• On your way to the city of Farling, which would mark the halfway point of your journey to the Everleaf, you were attacked by a small group of fey creatures that magically appeared in a copse near the road on which you were travelling; the means by which they appeared completely confound the party's arcanists, but it seemed clear at least that this was no ordinary magic, and perhaps no magic at all. After defeating the fey, their bodies soon faded away again – though one of them only after removing a brooch of Cyclopean make it was wearing –, which likewise was beyond explanation.
  
• Later that day, you came across the wrecked and partially looted remains of a caravan which had been on its way to the Academy. It turned out it had been ambushed by a small band of hobgoblins that laired in the nearby ruins of an ancient dwarven fortress, led by the warlord Nathrak. As you learned from a letter in his study, they were ultimately working for someone known as Ardranoth – infamously the name of an evil wizard and necromancer who was slain during the Great War a hundred years ago. Apart from having been specifically instructed to take prisoners (of which you only found one, Naëme Gladley, one of the caravan guards) for "examination" for some unknown purpose, they also were ordered to recover something called the "Shard", an item (?) en route to the Academy, according to the letter.
     From Gladley, you learned that their caravan was indeed carrying a small box, its contents undisclosed, which you discovered empty in the wreckage, bound for that centre of arcane learning. She also told you that her fellow prisoners were marched to an unknown destination through a magical portal – which some of the hobgoblins had previously talked about, mentioning something a supervised by an unknown, robed being whose mere presence was extraordinarily terrifying to both the prisoners and the hobgoblins – a lich, possibly, some of you deemed. She later overheard her captors talking about a "keep", but knew nothing beyond this.
  
• In Farling, you witnessed a young man being brought in by the city guard. Having turned up at the gates of Farling on a horse, he seemed to be in decent physical health, but appeared to have suffered some sort of extreme mental trauma, being entirely unresponsive and indeed catatonic. You eventually found out that he was part of a group of young adventurers who'd left for Stonegaard Keep, a ruined eladrin stronghold two days' ride southwest of Farling; near this fortress, the eladrin general Kyrianne Vamèssen suffered a defeat so ignoble and unexplainably foolish during the Great War, outright leaving her own troops to die while she fled and ultimately took her own life, that her name is cursed among eladrin to this day. Why the adventurers travelled to the keep isn't entirely clear – perhaps to investigate rumours of the keep allegedly being haunted, perhaps to search for ancient eladrin treasured buried beneath it; no one could tell you for sure.
  
• Not quite halfway to Stonegaard Keep, you found yourselves ambushed by a perfectly mundane bulette, a fight that escalated when Annetta's wild magic caused a number of slaads to appear out of thin air amid a deluge of elemental storms. During the battle, Alagand somehow found himself briefly transported to a different realm or plane – the Elemental Chaos, he surmised –, where he witnessed a fortress-city inhabited by githzerai under siege by a vast army of demons and elementals.
     Not long afterwards, you had almost reached the Keep when Alagand's past caught up with him in the form of a group of angels, servants of Tiamat, looking to take the elf back to the dark halls of their deity. You objected in the strongest possible terms to this and managed to fight them off, though one angel unfortunately managed to escape, no doubt carrying back word of their defeat to the church of Tiamat; Alagand meanwhile confessed that during the time he spent dead, he had some manner of dream – one he knew, somehow, would result in the minions of the Dragon Queen making a move against him.
  
• On the surface, Stonegaard Keep sat quietly on its hill throne, but all the more ominously for it, especially when you discovered that the same group of riders whose tracks you'd encountered on your way to the castle had apparently chosen to explore it as well. They left their horses at the foot of the hill just outside the entrance to a cave before continuing on foot to climb up to the castle itself – the horses, however, were no longer there, gore staining the ground where they'd presumably been tethered, and a number of tracks and marks suggesting someone or something had dragged them into the cave. After making it past an illusionary wall and following the cave as it descended and wound its way northwards into the earth, you discovered who was responsible: several trolls calling a small cavern deep underground their own, accompanied by a fey creature known as a choker. The trolls, who seemed to be in the employ of one "Lady Gharmya", were defeated with amazing ease, though the choker managed to escape; the solid stone door at the other end of the cavern, however, suggested that there were more discoveries yet to be made here, maybe.
  
• The moderate underground complex that lay beyond turned out to be the lair of this Lady Gharmya, whose acquaintance you made before long: a hobgoblin vampire, she had over a dozen of her living kind in her command, in addition to a human scoundrel by the name of Kevran whom Taldrel, back in Niemund, had dealt with before, and another undead hobgoblin called Varn, a much cruder and more savage creature than the 'Lady'. While she was not especially revealing when it came to her plans and doings, you nevertheless managed to learn a few things from her: that the wrathful spirits of the soldiers whom Kyrianne Vamèssen left to die, for instance, still linger to this day, having been buried near the keep and now trapped behind a magically warded door by the hobgoblins within this very complex, loathing the living and above all the general who'd abandoned them a hundred years ago. Gharmya, apparently, had plans of some sort for them – or perhaps her master Ardranoth did –, but ultimately found the restless dead too inconvenient or difficult to "tame", and so seemed content to keep them locked away for the time being. Little else was revealed, however, apart from the fact that she and Ardranoth were working toward some mysterious "grand end" – and that, perhaps, some of Ardranoth's servants were keeping secrets from one another. Apart from some as yet untranslated letters and maps gleaned from Gharmya's possession, not much of interest was found in the complex, which served chiefly to house Gharmya and her troops – various facilities for the use of the latter and a small temple dedicated to Bane were all that seemed at all noteworthy, and even so no further clues regarding the mysteries of Stonegaard Keep were discovered.

MMAgCh fucked around with this message at 00:42 on May 17, 2010