Hugo Tuya’s guards have finished investigating the destruction of an observatory to the north east of Estala, and are ready to make their way over the high pass to Cauldron lake in pursuit of the deepfolk team that did this terrible deed. The cast for this session:

  • Bao Tap, human stormcaller
  • Calim “Ambros” Nefari, human rimewarden
  • Itzel, elven astrologer
  • Kyansei of the Eilika Tribe, wildling barbarian
  • Quangbae, wandering blacksmith

They rested another day at the observatory, to recover a little more from their injuries and prepare for the journey over the high pass. It was during that rest period that, standing on the outer wall of the observatory looking over the mossy stone of the mountain pass below, Bao Tap realized a huge storm was coming. They gathered in the tower to discuss it, and decided to set out anyway: they had little time to rest, and Bao Tap’s storm magic in conjunction with Kyansei and Itzel’s wild knowledge would surely be enough to see them through the worst of it …

They were right. The following morning they set off early, picking their way along a narrow path that would merge into the high pass over the mountain range, and by midday the storm was upon them. They kept moving for as long as they could, but in the early afternoon the raging winds and hail became too intense. Rather than stop, Bao Tap cast a spell to protect them from the worst of the weather and they trudged on over the slick and icy ground. Just an arm’s length from their small group on either side the winds howled and a swirling wall of hail and snow blocked their view of the mountains and the gulfs of air beyond their path. They picked their way carefully along the narrow path to the high pass, and then began trudging wearily up the jumbled stone-scattered, ice-slicked ground of the path itself. The storm was still furious when they stopped for the evening, but Bao Tap was able to cast a storm shelter to protect them for the night. They set up a small camp and did their best to sleep on the frozen ground, and in the morning when they woke the storm was gone, its rage spent harmless against the uncaring stone of the mountains, their sleep barely disturbed by its raging winds. Under a clear sky, they set off along the pass towards the west.

That evening the pass descended into the valley on the far side of the mountain range, and opened out to a vista of steam-shrouded forests. Below them lay Cauldron Lake in a bowl in the mountains, surrounded by trees and thick with mist and steam. Beyond the lake and the forests, mostly obscured in the last clouds of the storm’s passing, the mountains rose again – somewhere in amongst them must be the middlemarch, the passage they would take with Hugo Tuya to the western half of Hadun. For now though, their goal was to explore those mist-covered forests. They found a small travelers’ hut at the top of the pass, and settled in to rest.

Cauldron Lake

The next morning they set about exploring the Cauldron lake area. They started heading south towards the entrance to Estala, then circled clockwise around the lake. They sought signs of passing deepfolk raiders, injured trappers, and any remaining camps of deepfolk they might need to destroy. They found no deepfolk, but a ruined trapper’s camp on the eastern edge of the lake held four reaminates, which attacked the PCs as soon as they entered the camp – sure evidence of passing deepfolk. Near the exit from the valley towards Estala they found signs of multiple deepfolk camps, and as they passed west around the southern edge of the lake they found more evidence that the deepfolk had passed this way.

On the western side of the valley the forest gave way to a slope of scree and rubble, which led up to the middlemarch. Their guess was that in this area some piece of the mountains must have fallen in the distant past, creating a field of destruction strewn with huge rocks and broken ground. Many streams ran through this area, some of them erupting as boiling water from the broken ground, and the rocks were slick with constant fresh water. In a chasm here they found a dead deepfolk raider and a small handcart he might have been dragging; pulling it up, they recovered a small telescope from the observatory, confirming that the deepfolk who destroyed the observatory must have passed back through the middlemarch. They moved on, checking the northern slopes of the lake and finding no evidence of the passage of deepfolk there.

This search took them two days to complete, and when they were done they had some sense of what had happened. A force of deepfolk raiders had come out of the middlemarch, traveled through the Cauldron Lake area and exited the valley to Estala. At the edge of the valley they made camp, and at some point between leaving the valley and reaching Estala they had likely split, with a small force heading to the the observatory. That force, after sacking the observatory, traveled over the high pass and returned to the mouth of the valley facing Estala, where they camped and met up with the remnants of the force that attacked Estala. Together that force then retreated through Cauldron valley to the middlemarch, losing a member and a telescope at the entrance to the middlemarch before disappearing into the mountains.

With this knowledge the PCs prepared to return to Estala, where they would rejoin Hugo Tuya and begin their own plans to enter the middlemarch. Now they were sure something waited for them there, and the pass was nowhere near as safe as Hugo Tuya had led them to believe. What would they do? Could they convince Tuya to give up his journey, and if not, could they survive the pass? They turned their backs on the mountains and headed back towards Estala, their hearts heavy with all the slaughter they had witnessed, and the foreboding of the bloody work that almost certainly lay ahead of them.