The Market Square Fall Festival brings people from all along the Crescent Coast to the city of Raicliffe. The afternoon before the festival, as many trader and performer caravans gathered in Market Square, there is a shriek of terror. The widow Inla Salmons, well known in town for her spellbinding rhubarb pies, is horrified that her husband had returned. Unfortunately, Rone Salmons died four years before in a mine collapse. A stalwart group of youths responds to the widow Salmons’ screams and soon after finds the zombie of Mr. Salmons in a nearby toolshed. After a brief fight the zombie is vanquished, and the youths turn their attention to larger matters: what could have caused Rone Salmons to rise from the dead and appear some 10 days walk south of his final resting place? They decide to take action and investigate the matter at its source.
Mounted and well provisioned, the group treks north toward the caved-in Cloud Break Mine. Along the way, they discover a series of circular, loosely filled-in, yard-wide holes in the ground. The broken ground is speckled with the odd animal bone shard. The holes mark the passage of the dreaded plains grick. A clutch of gricks finds the party and attacks, hungry for their next meal. But the group survive and turns the dinner table, so to speak, by making spit roast grick for supper.
Two days later, when the group passes by a small underground spring-fed wetlands, they find the area swarmed over with lungpiercers: half vulture, half mosquito creatures that inject their eggs into their victim's lungs. A flight of lungpiercers attacks but the group fights them off and the group leaves the area before more of the vile beasts arrive.
Four days out from Raicliffe, the group mounts a rock strewn hillock and finds an abandoned battlefield memorial.
quote:
Battle of Stony Slope
This Imperial battlefield park memorializes the Imperial Regent Army and the Loyalist Army under House Sanclare in one of the bitterest encounters of the Succession War. Here, on High Sun 25, 26, and 27 of 1372, 791 Imperial soldiers and attached personnel died fighting several thousand Loyalists.
While taking refuge for the night in the memorial’s weather beaten hospitality building, the group is awakened by a frightful sound. Dozens of slain soldiers interred just beneath the surface, now undead, claw their way out to attack the party. After a furious battle under the pale moonlight, the group breaks camp early and makes their way north toward their destination.
At the abandoned mine, the group finds the miners who lost their lives to the cave-in four years ago. They are zombies, like poor Rone Salmons, milling around performing menial tasks poorly. Empty husks of their former lives. After defeating the zombies, the group is surprised by a band of ghoul-like, death worshipping kobolds who are living in the remnants of the mine. Kobolds defeated, the party prepares to capture their leader, but the creature escapes up a narrow fissure in the mine wall. Circling around the back of the escarpment, the group winds its way up to the cliff edge overlooking the mine entrance. There they find the kobold leader preparing to sacrifice a living creature wrapped in an oily tarp. Dead bodies litter the ground. The kobold leader is clearly insane—it dies without a fight.
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:31, Tue 05 July 2016.