Escape from the Underdark¶
"Your Orc-friend may not find a warm welcome in Duer'allen." — the party's counsel at Kaelten on the roads home (S328)
A campaign of the Fourth Age, begun in 2026 and still being played, whose one document is the gamemaster's running notes (S328). The party are refugees and guards from Alderidge, a small community near Rockport in northern Dalmar, carried off in a raid and loose in the Underdark. Their road home has led up through a cursed dwarf-hold to the snows above Dru'Bazan, down into the blighted fallen kingdom of Angorath, to the corrupted shrine of the Caerylas Tree, and through a necromancer's portal to the town of Ornwell in Brundal, on the trail of the necromonger Eggrin.
Gap
The campaign is in progress. Its notes mix what was played with what was prepared; the account below follows them as far as they record play and marks the rest as planned. No world-scale consequence is recorded yet, and the notes give no year in any calendar.
The party¶
| Character | Notes |
|---|---|
| Narth | Dwarf paladin of Clan Khezderk of Durn'kovac in Dru-Bazan, a caravan guard on the Rockport road. His god is given first as Khardas, then as "Ancients". |
| Nimeni | Halfling druid and sage, settled at Alderidge. Bearer of the Heart of Winter. |
| Soval | Half-elf hexblade warlock whose family lived in hiding; his mother, a witch, was lost in the raid on Alderidge. |
| Strider | Human ranger of the Rockport Rangers, who "intervened in the attack on Alderidge" by wild men, goblins and orcs. |
| Linholdt | Dwarf monk of Clan Khezderk, a caravan guard with Narth. Also written Unholdt. |
| Kalhor | Orc paladin of Erolan, "lord of the sky", from a tribe of the Silverpine forests "mostly killed" and displaced. Also written Kalthor and Kalthar. |
| Ronda | Appears with the party from the Caerylas shrine onward, and takes raven form. |
Arc¶
The Underdark¶
The notes open on loot from a dark elf and three dwarves fallen in the dark, and a great cavern lake where goblins were "sacrificing to their nameless tentacle lake monster" (S328). Sliding down a slope, the party came into an ancient dragon's lair cut with drow temple stonework, and on to the chasm of the Whitefall River, a hundred and fifty feet above a calm river. Three ways lay ahead: down the river to Whitestill lake, where gnomes guard themselves with summoned water elementals and kuo-toa hold the far shore; up through limestone caverns to a fungal nest of zombies and quaggoths; or through old iron mines to the Cursed Dwarven Hold, whose lower halls the quaggoth Ingoh ruled with some eighty goblins and whose upper halls hold dead dwarves and a curse that splits the spirit of anyone who touches their treasure.
The pass and the coven¶
"They made it through the dwarven gates to a high mountain pass, snowed in" (S328). The pass belongs to a yeti, "the protector of the vale", who hunts the corrupted, and to winter wolves and a snow leopard. The party shared shelter with a trappers' camp, Joe, Elsted and Urgin, who had lost two of their number and were running short; Urgin was cursed. The party killed the yetis and skinned three, and in the yetis' ice trophy hall a young yeti seized the Heart of Winter, a relic that "radiates cold", and fled with it; the party tracked it down and Nimeni came to carry the Heart of Winter.
Below the pass, in a boreal forest, a coven of a warlock and two witches was excavating marble elven ruins with the dead, and had caged three fairies over a smoking cauldron. A green fairy, Syrlandia, guided the party in; the trapper Joe was found among the dead (S328). Soval made a blood accord with Zixalan, who gave him a small red stone to find his mother, who the notes say is dead "back in Arne'Athosia".
Kaelten¶
The party "arrived in Kaelten Meadow", a high pasture village of Dru'Bazan's dwarves that raises sheep, goats and yaks (S328). There the High Councillor Gunril received them and the shaman Hamruhn lifted the curse, "a Shadow-Curse". Three roads home were offered: the under-road to Duer'allen, the capital, and then east to Dalmar; south into orc territory, "the clans of Val'mulrek"; or north-east into Angorath, "a fallen kingdom beset by banditry", the fastest way back to Rockport near the Athosian Woodlands. They took the third.
Angorath and Redallion¶
After six days in the mountains the party came down through a canyon past abandoned wagons, one carrying the head of a necromancer and two necromantic spellbooks, into country stricken by the Earthblight, which breeds flesh-monsters: a dead forest of tentacled "clicker beasts", and a palisade of cannibals. "Nobody knows what started the Earthblight. 20 years ago .. cataclysmic 5 years ago" (S328). With a band of survivors led by Hendrik and Lewis they went by boat to Redallion, the ruined capital, where about 120 survivors hold the Temple of Khardas under a council of three: the dwarf high priestess Brugid Oregrain, the former watch sergeant Henry Yallovi, and the scavenger chief Livia Descorta. The wizard Muralyon of Castle Bluethorn, "crazy split personality", conjures their food and burns the infected.
The shrine of the Caerylas Tree¶
Brugid had sent Livia west to the elven shrine of the Caerylas Tree in the forests of Uran'Syvalla, and the party went after her. The shrine is "a quarter mile perfectly circular, pristine marble wall 15' high", with three arched gates of Spring, Summer and Winter; within, the grass is clean, but the six-hundred-foot tree "is leafless, black and covered in red pulsing pustules", and the wall is ringed by "Thousands of Elven Husks", abominations and two wicker giants (S328). Livia was camped inside, wounded, among some three hundred elven dead whose wounds were "long 3-clawed slashes … perhaps a dragon". An old priest who died there left gifts: to Narth a holy symbol of Auria with the charge "Seek the Seed", to Ronda an onyx raven idol, and others to the rest. The notes then point the party "North-North East … 200 miles" to a floating pyramid, a floating city taking in refugees, and record the party's morning escape from the shrine before the tree could collapse, and a return through bore-holes, caverns and a dark elf town, where Strider was lost for two days, to the edge of Redallion (S328).
Eggrin¶
Back in Redallion, the prisoner Eggrin talked the party into letting him raise a "protection circle", which was a necromantic summoning circle, and "flooded the enclave with zombies"; the party destroyed it (S328). Muralyon traced it to a demonic necro-shrine under the Market Square. In the sewers beneath they found a room where twenty-four living people were spiked to the ground with their red life-force drawn into a black sphere, guarded by a maw abomination, and beside it a room of portals. Eggrin fled through the one live portal, and the party followed, Kalhor sick with plague.
Ornwell¶
The portal opened into the wine cellar of a manor outside Ornwell, a seaside market town of the kingdom of Brundal, whose capital is Wellhorn (S328). Under the manor a second spike room and portal room were half built. Eggrin is known here as Salaran, chief advisor to Jorek Ellster, Earl of Ornwell, whom he has charmed into believing the work will shield Ornwell from the Blight; his people are rounding up "candidates" of high elven blood. Strider was deputized by the town's magistrate. At a hunting lodge five miles off the party took four prisoners from Salaran's people, a girl from the orphanage, a convicted thief, a wrongly dismissed half-elf maid and an old hermit farmer, and burned the house. The Flying City, a ziggurat, hangs fifty miles north over the sea.
Planned¶
Salaran knows the burning was sabotage and has rangers hunting the party; if they are caught he means to carry them to the flying city's dungeons (S328). The notes' last plan is for Nimeni and Ronda to go as bait, "the sacrifice", and be followed through the gate to the Earl's mansion.
What changed so far¶
- The necromantic circle at Redallion destroyed (S328), and its source traced to the shrine under the Market Square. See Angorath.
- Salaran's hunting lodge outside Ornwell burned and four of his captives freed (S328).
The Caerylas Tree, the "Seek the Seed" of the dying priest and the Dalmar and Dru'Bazan geography overlap the Fifth Age material of the Proturan Campaign and the Seed of Caerylas; the sources do not say how the two ages' accounts of the tree connect.