A prodigious fortress guarded the entrance, a castle that looked as if it were hewn from a massive boulder. A waterfall gushed from an enormous demoniac face at the city’s heights, falling down the tiers to a harbour below. Walls, towers, bridges – a formidable edifice of stone, glimmering and phantasmal, rising up the mountainside in seven tiers. Snow blurred theirvison, but something was evident up ahead, emerging as if carved from the mountainside. The forest continued to clear, giving way to bleak, frost-bitten stone. The trees thinned, and they could hear the sound of rushing water – a river, tumbling down the mountain in waterfalls. The path through the mountains is the haunt of Penumbral wraiths – and muscle-bound troll toll-collectors. Exorcised ghosts in the industrial town of Zephyr are defeated. They proceeded in ghostly form up the slopes of Mount Shudder. Traveling further to the Giant’s Head Inn, the party performed a ritual from the Book of Ghosts that allowed them to assume spectral form. They sojourned on to Hog’s Hollow, suffering a truffle shortage due to the over-long winter the Variegated Company previously helped avert, and discovered further evidence of Penumbral activity. They investigated the abandoned spa-town of Snugging, discovering through judicious use of ghostdust that Penumbra had transformed the town into a forward operating base in the Ethereal plane. Rather than fight, the party chose to negotiate, hiring the trollbloods on as guides. The party pressed on into the Unquiet Mountains, encountering the trollblood clan known as the Spineskulls, a group of “toll-collectors” little better than brigands. They also encountered the merchant Hearthbrag, trading various items (Comet also tried to steal a dragon’s egg, but ended up grabbing a display replica). Along the way the party encountered a number of Penumbral ghosts possessing polymorphed prisoners, sacred trees, and striking labourers, and used the Exorcism Box to dispel these malignant shades. These included the penal settlement of Beastbury, where prisoners from Hex were “reformed” by being polymorphed into beasts of burden Greenheart, a lumber-town run by a family of dryads and humans Zephyr, an industrial outpost of greenhouses and windmills, run on elemental labour and the twin settlements of Soothwick and Knavesville, the former shrouded in a permanent Zone of Truth. Equipped by the lich Valentina Nettlecrave with a musical Exorcism Box which would cause ghosts to depart from possessed creatures when wound up and played and freshly supplied with ghostdust from a dealer in the Memento Mori tavern, the party headed west from Hex, traveling through several nearby towns and villages. The party undertook a reconaissance mission to Mount Shudder, having ascertained that the spectral city of Penumbra – seeking revenge on Hex for its destruction in centuries past – had manifested on that fell peak. XP Awarded: 1000 XP Caulis’s familiar Eleyin plays with the skeletal cat of Valentina Nettlecrave.
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