Adventure World: Caravan session 18
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- Session date: 2023-03-10
Summary
Back at camp, Vicsous Mockery gets together for a practice session, and invite Certa to jam with them. Qog and Tsukaav attempt to help Big Krusk with a wagon repair, and then go to lunch with the local smith Teldorthan and talk about the trouble in town the other day.
Frond tells her grandmothers about her conversation with Dirina, the had of the temple of Moradin. She then goes to see her aunh at Nimozaran's tower to see if she can help in any way, and they learn of catacombs under the keep that were expanded under Hilja's reign. She and Kirar ask Lord Laukkanen for permission to investigate there, then go and talk to Brauni about helping investigate. the cousins make an attempt to talk about some of the tensions between them.
The next morning, people prep and then make their way to the Laukkanen family crypts. The thicket below the keep is called the Tombwood, a few acres of dense, gnarled woods predating the settlement here and never cleared. Here and there tombstones and other markers jut out of the stony ground, and a few corvids watch you warily from the trees. They find the entrance to the crypts easily enough: a set of marble doors set into the hillside, bearing the spider-web symbol of the Warden's family. There's a whiff of stale air as the doors open, surprisingly easily, revealing an antechamber that leads further back into the hillside. Kirar is able to guide well-enough from his reading, though the catacombs do twist and wind as they follow much of the natural caves. They find themselves in an old portion of the catacombs, the walls much less carved and more natural here.
They find a death giant - a type of giant chained up in a ritual circle. Qog is able to talk to it. It says that if he could be freed he would want to be, and that if we step into the circle, he doesn't know what would happen - we might be bound as well. The circle is his prison but the chains 'bind him elsewise'... Not to Hilja, though, we clarify - Tsukaav channels Kord's power to overload the circle. He does so and gets blasted into the wall but it does work - he says Tsukaav can call upon him in great need and he will aid him. Then he fades away. When the party examines the circle, they find that it was definitely binding her and her bloodline to the land and them to her, but the magic she used is actually much more ancient, to the extent that no one has ever even heard of a death giant. The party takes some candles and mine equipment, and leave.
