Session 1

As you can imagine, I was quite thrilled to be invited by Clan Tolorr to their family festival. I had been in correspondence with scholars of the clan for a few decades, and it was the opportunity of a quarter lifetime to go there in person.

An uneventful trip led to my early arrival. I had nothing to do but spend my days in cafés and cultural centers and my evenings in taverns exchanging ever more unlikely stories with the locals.
One morning in a café, I found myself sharing a table with rather unusual company. Perhaps our alienness drew us towards each other. First, there was N'drak, a kobold (!) who had evidently grown up in a Dwarven hold(!!). I believe it was Dongun. He appears to be one of those people blessed with innate magical ability due to ancestry or patronage. In his case it seems to be related to the Earth element, though something else seems to be going on. Then there is Kolkar. He's a dwarf, but rather an unusual one. Quiet and light on his feet. And apparently part…molten rock? Most unusual. The cousins might not appreciate him visiting their tree cities, ha ha! Lastly there is Aetoin. (Do I detect an Elvish root to that name? Derivative of Aetoilinn? Our ancient history of cultural cross-influences is why I am here, after all.) Despite the unusual name, this is indeed a dwarf you would expect from a classic play: a priest in armor, and an expert in exploring the deep underground.

Ria, a curator for Clan Tolorr and a gnome of considerable repute, joined us for breakfast. Doubtlessly she was excited to see such an odd grouping. Finding out that we were at loose ends, she suggested that we band together and create our own legends. Somewhat impertinent of her, but she is a gnome after all, and indeed we had nothing better to do. “Creating a legend” is rather vague, so she suggested that we start by investigating the Battle of Fallen Flags. Very well then, we all went to the library after breakfast.

At the library, we found that the Battle of Fallen Flags was an event in the tragic, internecine Five King's War, but nothing else of note in this matter. We incidentally found out that there is an Emperor's Peak that is not associated with any emperor. However, in the course of general information gathering, we learned more about a massive load of adamantine that had recently been found deep beneath Highhelm. The dwarves are mining this load to create a defensive work they call Torag's Shield. This enterprise is absorbing all of their spare capital and labor, and then some. This activity in turn opens up opportunities for outsiders like ourselves to contribute our talents to the metropolis in ways that would otherwise be handled internally. We were happy to provide our services in some matters:

• Desperate need for language tutors. This turned out to be much harder than we thought.
• A group of Knights of Lastwall in need of local guides so they would stop inadvertently offending everyone they met. This turned out to be comparatively easy. They stopped expecting people to understand Taldoran if they JUST. SPOKE. IT. SLOWLY. AND. LOUDLY, and actually turned out to be a fine bunch of lads.
• A restaurateur needed help because they were about to get their mushroom restaurant, The Silvercap, closed down by the health authorities, and they suspected sabotage. And too right they were! The walls had been covered in radical fungal liberation slogans, the local fungus had been “freed”, the potentially invasive species destroyed. Most disturbingly, someone had decapitated the sheep carcasses in the cooler and animated them! We had quite a nasty fight in all senses of the word. And we never found the heads! You might think it hardly exercises the little grey cells to conclude that some fungal leshy Druid has gone off the deep end, but I am not so sure. Druids don't normally go in much for necromancy. And I don't know when I will be able to look at mutton stew again. At least the owner is in the clear.
• A stalwart lady of Burntown, one Elga Sfarhaggn, needed some reasonably competent labor to help at the armory. We didn't mess up, and all of us were well satisfied with a day's work.

We found a few other things to do unrelated to the labor shortage:

• There is a grand waterfall in the deeps called Diomira's Drop. People attempt to descend this slippery vertical mass. Doing so is quite impossible, but it is an act of bravery to try. Safety measures are in place, which is just as well, as my feet shot out from under me at the first step and away I went! So much for Elvish balance and grace! The others suffered similar comic failures, except for Aetoin, who made an excellent showing and helped our reputation.
• There was an open invitation for tryouts to join a team of Basilisk Ball players. This is a sport that awards having a lot of mass with a low center of gravity. I did not excel. Neither, surprisingly, did either of the dwarves in the party. But little N'drak has made it to the next round! That kobold simply cannot be tackled. It's a sight to see!