After the last adventure, both Castlebar and Sorel chanced upon a nest of feverworms; they got all bit up and incapacitated, shivering under piles of blankets. Vecna had to wait out the fever or give up on reclaiming the Forge.

Fortunately reinforcements were on the way. Roffle and Korvask were traveling to reinforce the effort to retake the Forge. They were on their way up the road to the front door when they encountered a lone fungaloid out hunting. The fungaloid offered to take them to meet up with the other dwarves, in exchange for help in the future. Roffle agreed, and they made it to Vecna without further incident.

INTO THE FORGE

Then they headed down the crude shaft cut in the side of the mountain. At the bottom, they encountered another giant frog, and had a desperate battle that they won handily, though both Vecna and Roffle were giggling hysterically in a drug-fueled bout of uncontrollable hilarity. They pulled back and waited twenty minutes for the effects to subside, but in that time a pack of goblins with skull helmets came to exit through the vent, and violence threatened.

Vecna told them to back off, and the dwarves stepped out of the passage, letting the goblins go. It was tense, but did not descend into violence. Continuing on they found the Glitterhame, and followed the trail to the massive door. Vecna unlocked it, and they headed into the area with the forge and the great hall.

Vecna remembered the hidden door and avoided the traps by the statues, and even remembered which stair was rigged to trigger an alarm before entering the great hall. All was still and silent as they ascended into the massive chamber.

They smelled brittlestone, a horrible material that grows on bones and remains and renders them animate, filled with a hate for the living. Keeping a careful eye out (and not investigating a weird skittering noise,) they continued to the doorway into the forge. It was right where they remembered it.

THE MASTER FORGE

They passed through the door, and explored the forge cautiously. At the very back, they found the Master Forge. The entire chamber had taken decades of intensive work to complete, but the Master Forge was surrounded by glittering darkness, next to a vast pit, out of sight from the rest of the forges. It was laced with runes, a mighty tool for a master that was designed to withstand millennia of use. Korvask used his skill as an enchanter (and some of his blood) to activate one rune on the anvil of the forge, and that was enough for them to say they claimed the forge.

They withdrew through the doors and were attacked by a pair of skittering bone constructs. After pitched battle, they slew the things, though Korvask and Roffle were both wounded pretty badly in the fight. They withdrew to a secure storage area in the forge to stitch up their gashes and rest.

While there, Korvask heard the whispering of a long-dead spirit that was trying to tell him sanity blasting truths; he focused his mental energies and actually destroyed the ghost. Newly wary (and bandaged) they decided they should look in on the shrine before they left.

THE SHRINE

In the unfinished shrine, they found four animated corpses of the dwarves that were left behind to keep the site maintained when the clan marched off to war. It appeared they had died from violent injuries. The fellowship slew them, and saw that brittlestone had been planted here; the bone creatures were also not “local.” So, some necromancer (or hireling of a necromancer) was trying to cultivate this site to eventually serve as a place to create masses of undead. That plan was failing! They resolved to return with numbers and neutralize the brittlestone.

As they left the great hall, they were attacked by three sporehounds. The battle was sharp but over quickly; even wounded, the dwarves made short work of the lunging fungal monsters. They withdrew, and in the wilderness on the way back they were ambushed by a fungal ogre. The monster fell to their persistent attacks, and they finally reached relative safety.

The forge was reclaimed. Time to go home and Tell the Tale.

(The session took two and a half hours, including making a character and taking a 10 minute break to deal with childcare.)