Wealsun 25, 621 CY
City of Greyhawk
Garden Quarter
The Cathedral of the Unorthodox Common Church of Greyhawk was not an uncommon sight for some of the members of the Company of the White Oak, but this was the first time so many members of the Company had stood together within its walls. It had been one week since the resurrection of Vask. Some people had barely got started on their downtime plans for the typical two weeks when they received the summons to come here.
Here, more specifically, was the Hall of the Patriarchs on the fourth floor of the cathedral, and if it resembled a king’s throne room more than a shrine of worship, that was surely intentional.
Present and accounted for was the entire assembly of the Company -- Haruspex Niv (and his hireling Peter), John Grond (and his hireling Turmrulda), Percy, Brother Langdon (and his hireling Saraband), Reed Underbough (and his hireling Herv), Rom Riverbluff, Brother Ulrich the Maimed, Gendri, and Vask. Besides themselves were the Wizard Prospero, who Vask once served, the High Priest Tor Hiertaal, who raised Vask from the dead, the Patriarchs Pascalis Numitor and Krasimir, of Percy’s and Gendri’s acquaintance (they had both aided Percy with scribing the Hold Person spell into his prayerbook, and Pascalis Numitor had met with Gendri to discuss Keith Winton), and the Lama Selokus who rode with Roger Bacon.
“Welcome, friends,” Prospero said. “Good to see so many of you have not lost your courage after meeting some of the challenges you now know we face. But it is another, related matter that you have been summoned here today…”
“Indeed,” Tor Hiertaal said, “for today’s business is in regard to the quest of which we spoke on our last meeting. To repay your debt to the church for the resurrection of Vask, you must undertake this.”
Prospero coughed and interrupted with “You might want to even if you didn’t have to. My auguries tell me that it would bring you weal If you found them.”
Tor looked annoyed, to have Prospero stepping on his reveal. “The ‘them’ to which Prospero refers are likely already known to you, for surely you have heard of the missing stones of Stonering. The village just east of Greyhawk City, Stonering, was so named because of the double ring of menhirs, or standing stones, that were the village’s oldest features. That is, until 25 years ago, when every single stone in both rings just vanished, overnight, without a trace. Magic was, of course, suspected as the tool for this vandalism on such a grand scale, but what made the mystery so baffling was that even the divinations of the high priests, such as myself, could not discern anything other than that the rings had been moved to a secret location within 70 miles of where they had been. Years passed, and the magics that shielded the stones from discovery did not fade, but just of late, word has reached us of a hidden dale in the Menhir Hills where the stones were sighted, or ones just like them, looking just as they had in Stonering.
“We could go investigate ourselves,” Selokus said, “and, I myself will ride behind you, but further divinations have revealed that few individuals will be able to enter the rings of stones, and that some members of the Company of the White Oak might be the ones to do so.”
Prospero spoke again. “The ranger who found the rings described a cairn at the center of them, a cairn which was not present in Stonering. Although it is perhaps a stretch of definition, it is possible that opening the cairn might be the answer to that very important message we’ve spoken of in the past.”
Selokus added “Roger Bacon and Fridswid are still here in the city. The three of us will ride behind you, but this needs to be your quest. We will make camp some distance away, so you can return to us if you are in the direst need of aid.”
“That said,” Tor Hiertaal finally said, getting a word in edgewise, “We will do what we can to aid you even before you leave. If there are supplies you need, or other ways of which we can be of service to your quest, you may name them now.”
Reed was the first to speak up, saying they could use more magic weapons. The patriarchs and high priest discussed this -- was there precedent for it? They excused themselves to an adjoining room for 10 minutes to discuss it, then came back with the answer that a potion or scroll would be within their power, but they would not give or loan out magic weapons.
Brother Ulrich was next to speak, accepting that implied offer of a scroll with a healing spell on it. This was provided before they left, as well as promises to have a new cart and mules, a water barrel, ten weeks of iron rations, and two spare wheels for the cart all there in the morning for them.
Everyone was resolved to go on this quest, except for John Grond. He made apologies and explained that he wanted more time to see if he could find out what his magic sword could do, but he wished his friends good luck.
Wealsun 26, 621 CY
All was waiting for the Company just after dawn in the Garden Quarter. Further, they were introduced to a short, baby-faced man called Trotter, who was the finder of the hidden dale and promised to lead them to it.
Roger Bacon, Selukos, and Fridswid were there as well, with their fast chargers. They would ride behind. The companions who were slowed down by heavy armor switched it out for leather armor and stored their platemail in the cart, while Herv and Vask were strong enough to wear platemail without being slowed down. That did not mean they would be comfortable -- the summer weather would be uncomfortably hot on everyone, but more so on those in platemail.
It was 35 miles northwest to the dale, which would take three days to reach, traveling through the hills. On the first day, they followed the Selintan River north, journeyed to the Village of Stonebridge, and crossed over the stone bridge and headed into the western Cairn Hills, on the Greyhawk Peninsula. Vask had brought Gert the Bear, who terrified some gnome goat herders, but there were no serious encounters that day.
Wealsun 27, 621 CY
Trotter led them along animal trail after animal trail as they made their way west, north, into a wooded section of hills, and then west more. The day was uneventful until that afternoon, when they crossed paths with a group of just over a dozen armed, lightly armored men. The two groups hollered out to each other, with the other group acting more suspiciously and taking more precautions for battle. But neither group wanted to start a fight so they went their separate ways.
That night, during second watch, Langdon, Saraband, Gendri, and Vask spotted some people approaching their camp. Saraband dropped a sleep spell on them while everyone else was woken up, and the spell dropped all the people sneaking up on them from the east. Missile attacks flew in from the south, and a crossbow bolt hit Reed, the smallest target. Between Percy’s Hold Person spell and missile fire, by the time Langdon and Gendri ran up to melee the remaining brigands, there were three left on their feet. Gendri knocked one unconscious, and the remaining two fled into the night. In total, there had been 14 brigands, barely larger than the Company’s numbers.
All of the brigands were killed except for Gendri’s prisoner, who was tied up, gagged, and tossed into the back of the cart. The brigands had only 70 silver pieces among them, so poor that the Company tossed most of their weapons into the cart too, to sell later.
The rest of the night was uneventful.
Wealsun 28, 621 CY
On this day, the Company left the Cairn Hills. Halfway across the peninsula was a long straight valley that separated the Cairn Hills from the Menhir Hills on the valley's west side. That afternoon they left the wooded part of the hills and entered a wide swath of hills with only scattered trees and the occasional grove. In one of those groves was the hidden dell, but here Trotter ran into trouble and it took two extra hours to find the right trail. That evening, they succeeded in finding it.
The double ring of menhirs looked just like the double ring that had stood at Stonering, but with additional stones inside the greater, inner ring of twelve 15' tall stones, and a vaguely rectangular (though fatter on the east end) carin in the very center. The Company was approaching it from the south, so they could see nothing on the north side of the cairn.
Here, Reed checked for tracks and found the booted feet of at least a dozen men had come this way and circled the ring of stones. The brigands seemed the likeliest suspects, so their prisoner was finally ungagged and questioned. The brigand swore he'd never been here before, but he wanted to go as soon as possible -- not because of where they were at, but because what they were close to, the ruins of Lord Robilar's Castle.
The unguarded menhirs screamed trap to the experienced and wary Company, so they forced the prisoner to try and go in first. An invisible force smacked him hard enough to break ribs and sent him flying almost 20' back, in an arc that went 8' high. The brigand just laid there, seriously injured.
Despite this, Percy decided he would try going in, after stripping off his armor and saying a prayer to the Old Faith (which, luckily, he happened to know), and it worked. Now everyone else wanted to follow him in, but everyone else was repulsed (though never as far or struck as hard as the brigand had been) no matter what they tried. People tried new variations on getting through, and sometimes they worked and other times the same routine didn't. At one time, everyone thought you had to remove all armor and weapons, empty your mind, and say a prayer before entering, but then someone made it inside while fully armored and that threw off everyone's theory. Eventually, they figured out that trying different paths between menhirs that no one else had yet used yielded safer results than any other precautions anyone was taking. In the end, everyone but Haruspex Niv, Reed Underbough, and the hirelings and the animals were inside the invisible barrier.
Meanwhile, Percy had been examining the extra stones around the cairn and found there were four unusually shaped altar stones, each with a magical defense. And atop each stone (or, in one case, inside a hollow tube-shaped stone) was a weapon and another, more mundane, object. One was defended by fire, another by animated tentacles, another by cold, and the fourth by electricity. Percy and Rom both got hurt trying to get items off the altars, while Langdon jury-rigged a grappling hook and pulled a weapon off of an altar unharmed, and Ulrich just got lucky knocking the mace out of the flames without being burnt. All four weapons were retrieved, plus Rom had retrieved a coal brick from inside the icy interior of the blue marble tube-shaped altar stone. But what to do with them next?
It finally dawned on them that there might be some hidden purpose for them inside the cairn. The entrance to the cairn was an open doorway on the west side, but the interior looked to be impossibly dark. Ulrich braved entering first and found this was just a trick -- light from outside was actually coming in just fine. He, and then the others following, took a 15' long corridor into the only chamber of the cairn, in which was nothing but a stone rectangular pillar that reached the 13' high ceiling. On each face of the pillar was engraved a symbol of either fire, waves, mountains, or a cloud. The companions chose the correct corresponding items retrieved from the altars, touched them to the symbols, and the pillar slowly sank into the floor. And then sections of the floor started to sink into the floor, bit by bit, each lower than the last, until they began to form a spiral staircase going down…
TO BE CONTINUED
Session 27
Wealsun 24, 621 CY
The Cairn Hills
John was late. Frustrated with his lack of progress on communicating with his stubbornly silent magic sword, he had missed the start of the epic quest to find the Hidden Dell of the Ringstones and plumb its secrets, in order to earn the resurrection of Vask. Luckily, he would not have to travel alone to find the rest of his company; he had recently run into two mercenary veterans eager to come work for the Company of the White Oak (no recruitment necessary!), Alfred and Heinrich.
But the way was not clear (it was a hidden dale, after all) and soon they were hopelessly lost in the hills. It was then, when all hope seemed lost, that Roger, Selukos, and Fridswid rode up to them. They acted like they were not surprised to find them where they were, and offered to lead them to the dell. It was difficult keeping up with them, for their horses seemed unaffected by the rough terrain, even when they crossed out of the Cairn Hills and into the rougher Menhir Hills to the far west.
Wealsun 25, 621 CY
The Menhir Hills
The Hidden Dell
When the floor stopped dropping into a spiral staircase and the room fell into silence, Percy, Langdon, Rom, Ulrich, Gendri, and Vask – all the members of the Company who were able to pierce the barrier around the ringstones – conferred about what to do next. They had, admittedly, already accomplished the quest by entering the stone ring and entering the cairn at its center, but what to do about this level beneath the cairn? It made no sense, Langdon argued, to leave and report what they’d found, but have no idea what was down the stairs. So they went down for a peek.
The stairwell descended into a huge room with four pillars around it, and nothing else in the room other than four doors, one on each wall. And that, they decided, was peek enough.
Up above, Haruspex and Reed sat in close proximity outside the barrier, conspiratorially discussing what they could do if they combined the Conjurers Guild and the New Thieves Guild. And that was when John arrived with his two hirelings. The three riders did not stay, returning instead to their nearby campsite where they chose to remain. Also present were the hirelings Peter, Herv, and Saraband, plus Gert the Bear and the Company’s two unnamed mules.
John was filled in on what he’d missed, and then all of them were filled in when the party inside the ring left the cairn and came to speak with the party outside the ring. They were hesitant to leave because no one was sure if they could get back in if they left. John tried to enter the inner ring and was flung back even farther than anyone else.
Next, John was interested in taking a closer examination of the menhirs themselves. Everyone had noticed the lichen on the stones, but only a close examination revealed runes that the lichen obscured. Everyone went around now that these had been noticed and recorded on parchment what they were. They were unknown characters (42 of them, though some were duplicates), like from some other alphabet. Now they badly wanted to know what it read. Haruspex had a spell in his spellbook that would let him, but it was not one he had ever prepared for an expedition. He could study his book and prepare it in the morning.
Wealsun 26, 621 CY
The Menhir Hills
The Hidden Dell
The company resolved to stay the night here at the ring, spread out on both sides of the barrier, each with their own little campsite. Watches were established with no regard to which side of the barrier they were on. It was, by chance, a watch of all outside-the-barrier companions – John, Alfred, Heinrich, Reed and Herv – who were up at 3 am when intruders came upon them. It was seven gnolls, trying and failing at sneaking up on the guards on watch, which bought them time to throw rocks at the sleeping party members within the barrier and get them awake too. Like every gnoll they had ever encountered, these gnolls were easy to take down (mainly because gnolls like really big, long weapons, which are two slow to keep up with the fast-striking company). The gnolls were not poor, they all carried electrum and gold pieces, but they weren’t rich either. Gendri got a longbow out of the encounter.
An hour later, an even larger group of 14 orcs showed up. This encounter was more problematic because so many of the company hung back to use missile attacks, leaving John, Alfred, and Heinrich to meet the charge. And, while John was more than capable of handling them, Alfred was not so fortunate and was dealt a lethal blow. With the clerics “trapped” within the barrier, there was no way to heal him in time even if a healing spell could save him.
One orc who was found to be only knocked unconscious was tied up and, in the morning, questioned by Gendri, the only person who could speak their tongue. The orc said they had left the Skullsplitter Tribe, a hundred orcs strong, holed up at the ruins of Lord Robilar’s Castle, to rendezvous with the gnolls that were earlier killed, and seek their fortunes at Castle Greyhawk. But their commanders felt the standing stones were “calling” to them and insisted they stay longer and guard the area.
The orcs had electrum pieces on them, the company had collected over 100 of them this night and as third as much in gold pieces, but it was no haul like they preferred to find. In the morning, Haruspex cast his Read Languages spell -- but found that the writing was still gibberish! Reed had a thought on this; he had good instincts for the written language and he was convinced the letters were scrambled out of order. Instinctively, he rearranged them into an order that felt right, copied them down, and then Haruspex could suddenly read the message. It read: “ 4 keys 4 doors 1 right east 1 the way open left & 1 right.”
There were a few ways to interpret this, but the most obvious was in relation to the room with four doors under the cairn. But they did not feel they were ready to handle whatever was behind those doors under the cairn, so they decided to leave. Which meant finally testing who could exit out of barrier. Gendri went first and had no difficulty leaving, as did no one else. So they broke camp and left the dell, planning to head back to Grossettgrottell to rest.
En route, it was Reed who had the idea to report in with Roger and the other riders and see if they had any advice. Trotter, their guide, helped lead them to a campsite a mile away, where Roger, Selukos, and Fridswid sat there, looking like they were waiting for the Company. The three of them listened to all that had happened. Then Roger mentioned that they had never touched the runes on the menhirs to see if anything would happen, as it had when they touched the symbols on the pillar in the cairn. He asked them to go back and check, then report back to him.
Now everyone was curious to see, so they returned to the dell. John started going around and touching the inner menhirs. Sure enough, the runes on the first menhir glowed red. It was while John was touching the second menhir’s runes that Peter spotted them -- shadows moving back and forth over the grass. John swung with his sword, as if there were invisible opponents there, but it was the shadows themselves on the ground that were dangerous, for when one of them passed over John, he felt painfully cold and weaker.
But not too painful and not too much weaker. And the company now had seven magic weapons between them. The magically armed gathered around the shadows, boxed them in, and stabbed through them into the ground (with a javelin) or bashed them (with a mace) until the shadows dispersed.
After that, they tested the space between those two menhirs -- and everyone could pass safely through! Though solved by a most circuitous route, they had finally solved the riddle of how to safely penetrate the inner ring of stones. They returned to Roger straight away to tell him. The sorcerer said the three of them would examine the cairn in their absence, but leave the exploration beneath it to the Company upon their return.
Wealsun 27, 621 CY
The Cairn Hills
Grossettgrottell
Though the gnome community was familiar to Harurspex Niv, everyone else was a stranger to it. This was their first time seeing the crystal statues, the half-scale surface community, the full-sized inn (Corrippo’s Inn) where the elven innkeeper Halril greeted them, and the huge cavernous vault underground that served as “downtown” Grossettgrottell.
Haruspex Niv wanted to rent the entire inn for their use, which required some negotiating with Halril and the owner Corrippo, before he got his wish for 75 gold. Since that spent all the coins they had taken from the gnolls and orcs, they sought out Mather Amdur, Haruspex’s old friend, to seek some compensation. Mather offered to let up to four members of the Company stay in his clan’s tunnels, and treated them to a fine feast made with rare mushrooms recovered from the Forbidden Caves.
Wealsun 28, 621 CY
The Cairn Hills
Grossettgrottell
In the morning, the five items recovered from the altar stones in the dell were gone, having completely vanished…
