Entry 4, 12th of Wealsun

We have set out again to the undead portion of the River of Mithril. We discovered a boat which had been hauled up into a passageway off the docks, apparently belonging to a group of cultists. Before we dispatched them they spoke of the master, and they were wearing medialions that we later identified as belonging to the cult of Orcus, see overleaf.

We had originally assumed the master was the local necromancer, but as I said previously he appears to be a symptom not the disease. Could this place contain an artifact or entrapped avatar of Orcus?

We did also find a elf who claimed to have been a member of the gnomish expedition, while it seemed odd at first this was later confirmed true, and she joined us on our effort to get vengeance upon the snake.

The snake was tremendous, a sketch with measurements of the head overleaf. And while we were approaching its presumed lair it came out of the darkness to us. The battle was hard fought, but we were victorious. It’s entrails included the valuables of the gnomish expedition, whose value was just mostly in gold.

The elf revealed that she had had the bronze tablet detailing the dwarfen right of knighthood all along, and we set out to find the location detailed on the tablet. I have done my best to transcribe the dwarven runes and map on the next page. We found a defensible hallway, strange in my mind, closing off the docks from the deeper portions of the ruins, but the control hallways at the end seemed like a perfunctory guard post, as opposed to a truly defensible position. The rooms at the end contained some sort of communication tube allowing one to speak from one room to the next, but since both were on the same side of the portcullis, again this seemed an odd stylistic choice.

One of the scouts saw the approach of giant bees or wasps, and we sealed ourselves in and waited for them to pass. We continued on bypassing a reported giant frog of pink color, and on to a temple or shrine to a dwarfen god, Laduger. The room contained more memorials to the founding families, including some we had not seen on previous bronze doors, a slightly larger than life sized statue of the god that radiated strong magic, which we suspected would grant some sort of belling for crafts that were performed under the gaze of the god, and a giant hand, seemingly grown rather than crafted seamlessly from the stone. The hand itself other than seeming out of place was not interesting at this time.

Continuing on we encountered a tribe of goblins, death skulls, who gave us a rudimentary description of the surrounding areas, after we showed them out icons to Orcus. They described stone demons, ceiling monsters over a bridge, which I interpreted as a route back to the purported mushroom forest, and some other danger up ahead.

We continued and came upon a sinkhole, a place where the dwarfen magic had failed, this had been mentioned, as having been accessed from the cliffs above, and we have now conjoined the two previously unconnected areas. The stone demons did appear to enrapture me with a spell, and my companions were able to drive it off and snap me out of the fascination. We were in what appears to be a large residential area of the previous dwarfen settlement, but having seen no sign of the landmarks upon our map, we decided that the expedition would come to an end.