Skulls' Crossing

“Skulls' Crossing”
Rise of the Runelords episode
Episode no.	Episode 55
Date	2009
Game Master	Abbe
Characters	Dorothea Gloriana Honeypot Nell Velicia
Episode chronology ← Previous Next → "The Flood" "Wet Papa Grazuul"
Rise of the Runelords chapter list

In this chapter the heroes travel to Skulls' Crossing and find it in a bad state and ogres at work.

Skulls' Crossing

The villagers told us that the flood must have come from a dam upstreams called Sculls Crossing. I asked if it had been broken but they told us that it was a huge, old building from the old times and that it couldn't be destroyed, but if it was the whole town would be washed away. Still, something must be wrong there. We got ready to go there so we could see what had happened. I asked Kaven to make me some food for the trip while I readied my equipment for traveling. When we were about to go Velicia said we had to use her ritual to make strange horses appear from nowhere. They were faster than real horses and could run on water. We rode along the same road as to Fort Rannick but stayed along the river. It ran down a weird canyon. I couldn't tell why it seemed weird. It just did. Velicia wanted to ride over the water so when the road winded lower and closer to the water she jumped out onto the surface. I stayed on the road but tried ride through some rough terrain next to the road just to try it.

When we spotted the big dam from afar we stopped and Honeypot cast the telepathy ritual. We continued more carefully towards the dam. It was covered by sculls and had five especially big sculls that was some kind of ports for water. There was some damage done to it and water running through a shallow crack. There were some tiny creature moving about on top of it. We continued up the road. After a while it turned into stairs. They led into a tunnel. Now everyone except Velicia dismounted and sneaked inwards. The tunnel tuned and led to a 10 foot hight steep incline. Above we could hear some movement. It tuned out to be a bear. The others started climbing and said they also saw an ettin. There was fighting up there, but I couldn't see what happened. What I guess was the ettin talked in some strange language. Then a big bear fell down to where I was and the last of the others climbed up, except Velicia who teleported. I threw a knife into the bear and climbed up past it too. As soon as I got up the ettin cast a spell on us and awful black evil spirits attacked and I fell back down to bear. Quickly I climbed back up and and killed the ettin. The others soon killed the bears.

We searched the caves and I found bags that had belonged to rangers and some mostly eaten remains of smoked ranger. Gloriana said
"So that's what the ettin was talking about when he said something about bribed."
We continued along the tunnels and it led up to the dam. I sneaked up to the entrance, and then the others followed. There, we saw that the tiny creatures we had seen were lots of ogres out on the dam trying to break it with picks. One was shouting at the others. It seemed to be the leader and the others just workers.

The fight with ogres on top of the dam.

We discussed how we should fight them. At the entrance or out on the dam. In the end we just ran out there surprising them. I missed with my dagger, but Gloriana killed several and Dorothea even more. She cast some strange magic that killed more than half of them. After we had killed their leader the few left ran. Checking the corpses we noted that many of them had torches and several still warm. We also found a strange big thigh bone. On it was written something in giantish. Translated it said something like; "Break the dam says Barl Bonebreaker by the authority of Mokumurian."

We now had taken the dam from the ogres, but there was the water flowing over it and if we couldn't stop it, it would probably break. I had no idea of how a dam works and especially not that huge, ancient dam. Velicia thought about it and said that she had heard about it before:
"It's guarded by trolls and an ettin..."
"We shouldn't have killed the ettin." Honeypot said.
"It wasn't any good guard if it's that easy to bribe with dead rangers." Gloriana said.
"Dead smoked rangers." Dorothea added.