Loshdain, Eirmont (month 11) 13, 1027

We finish off dividing up some treasure.

We discuss what to do next. [On the side, the Star Seeker is modelled after a Hammer Head shark look.]

We could head off to the Tears of Asterius, and try to figure out the map we got from the craft. Knight Bachelor Ralph, the navigator, points out that the map we got was written pre-Tears of Asterius.

Before moving on, we cast speak with dead on the corpse we recovered.

What manner of being are you: I am a Pyrondian, the chief engineer on the Iron Hauler "blah".

Describe your home port: My ships home port is the city of "blah". The city is a trading city with Pyrithians, Damoclides, Pachydermions, and even a few Pyrondians, all trading in the city in the mountains.

Describe the planet to which the iron hauler was headed: Headed to the ancestors land, to see if we could trade with them.

How far is your home planet from Damocles: It is Damocles.

Where is the nearest populated planet from Damocles: The asteroid belt. [As far as the navigator is aware, there is only one asteroid belt, and it was formed when Damocles was destroyed]

We will ask more questions of the head in a week. We know from a previous interrogation, of a Yuan-ti priest, that the Pachydermions are a slave race to the others.

We have two weeks to wait whilst we finish the teleport drive, and investigate the ship.

Grey trains the marines in the meantime.

We do a commune a couple of time:

The asteroid belt is from more than one source, one of which is Damocles.

There are other navigational hazards in the void: pockets of varying temperature, different gases, and electrical hazards.

Loshdain, Eirmont (month 11) 20, 1027

Speak with dead fails.

Loshdain, Eirmont (month 11) 27, 1027

Lani finishes the teleport drive. We give it a dry run: it works fine.

A second speak with dead:

Describe the ancestors land: the ancestors land looks like a spot of light on a velvet background. Up close, it is a sphereical world of green a blue and white. [Noting Damocles is reputed to be flat.]

Where is the ancestors land relative to where they died: Just a little bit further on... [Probably Mystara then.]

What do you know of the drow: I do not know what a drow is.

What do you know of the Illithid: Even the dark Pyrondians fear the Illithid.

Where do the Dark Pyrondians live: Some live on Damocles, some live on the belt. Some are said to have gone to the ancestor land. [We now suspect a Pyrondian is an elf. The word means nothing to Pharannon.]

We teleport to the Tears of Asterius, and start to explore more. We find a rock, with steam, or maybe gas, coming out of it. We assemble an away team, and head out to look at it. The away team consists of Lani, Zim, Grey, Knight Brother Paul, and Knight Brother Jan.

We find a spot where gas ejects. Possibly mildly heated water. We climb our way in carefully. About a minute in, we find some kind of creature: some sort of orifice sticking out of the floor. It is the source of the steam.

The rock we are in is reddish, and is known for bearing iron, according to Lani. Further exploration shows that the place is clearly inhabited, as we find a series of rails. It could be a mining operation.

We start looking about quietly, and let Zim scout ahead. In scouting, Zim spots a hairy creature lurking outside the radius of the light. Zim tries to cast hold monster on the creature, but fails. It flees.

We head off down another passageway, and find a creature that excretes pure iron ingots. Weird. The creature is not magical. Some wagons are half full.

We follow the rails to the other end, and find a docking bay (really an open space). There are crates with ingots in them. Whilst there, we hear a creature near us. It charges, attacking, in a rage. We subdue it easily. It's a mongrelman.

It rages, even though it is subdued. The crossbow is made of iron.

We bind it, and continue to explore. After a while, it calms down. It says our ears look like the Pyrithians. He thinks Grey looks like he hasn't been in the sun. Pyrithians have green skin, he says. He feels that Lani looks positively dead.

He has a master, a dark elf. His master is overdue by a few days. They have all been having horrible dreams for days. Dreams of their master throwing them out into the void. He comes in a big ship. The master also has servants, other mongrelmen.

The master knows how to grow the beast. They arrived here, having fully mined another rock, to mine this rock, with a baby beast. The beast lives in the rock. They feed it grain. It would not be possible to separate it from the rock. When one rock is completely mined, they leave the beast behind, and it dies.

This mongrelman appears to be very perceptive, and smart. He also has a somewhat pragmatic view. For example, he voiced the view that even gods die, and fiht amongst themselves.

In their spare time they look after their children, sing, tell stories. They know that there used to be fewer rocks here in the past, presumably before Damocles was destroyed.

We get him to describe his dreams in more detail. Everyone dreams different dreams (sometimes similar), where in every case they die, or loved ones die. The message being delivered seems to be: you're all going to die.

His name is Awilda. And he is a she. She has three children, and she has a mate.

We decide to rest here, to see if we will also experience the dreams.

She shows us around, showing where the beast is fed, a part of the beast where it radiates heat, and so on. She doesn't show us her food stores. She leads us to their sleeping chambers. They sleep on discarded Beast skin, which is quite comfortable.

We wait until evening. Zim and Grey go to sleep. Grey wakes up screaming, and suffers effects similar to the nightmare spell.

People on board the Star Seeker, several miles away, also experience nightmares. It is possible to resist. [Ie, will save.]

We get fighters to comb the area for unusual rocks. One nearby, a new one according to Awilda, has regular shaped structures. We get picked up, and flown over.

We land, and find some corridors. We also hear a rumble, like that from a large throat.

The walls of the corridors are very strong, and have something else imbued into them, perhaps gorgons blood, presumably to keep out extra-planar influences, or divinations.

The corridors are 20 feet high, and 30 feet wide. Sneaking ahead, Zim sees a stereotypically evil looking creature. It is black, has red glowing eyes, sttands 20 feet tall, has large tusks, and big pointy teeth. It looks demonic, has at least four legs, and has spikes all over its body. It looks like it's upset, and hasn't been fed for a while.

Lani has heard of something similar (a Gorista), but they're not usually as big as what Zim saw.

At the entrance, we get Leo to do a divination.

It is not a demon, it is the source of the nightmares, and it only requires magic weapons to damage it. It is not an planar creature. It is not guarding something. It has spell and spell-like abilities in addition to the nightmare ability. It does have human-scale intelligence. It is not aware of either the mongrelmen or us. Its nightmare ability is active at all times. It is not well beyond our means to defeat it. It was originally placed here against its will.

We head out so we can rememorize, returning to the Star Seeker. We would like to have lured it outside, but it looks like it's too big to fit through the exit.

Soladain, Eirmont (month 11) 28, 1027

We prepare to attack the creature, Eight marines are ready to go with us. Before heading off, Grey casts a sending, to see what it's willing to tell us about itself and its situation. It answers with questions, in a somewhat insidious voice. Another sending confirms it's trapped there, and it indicates it seeks... company, and can offer to... talk.

We head there, buff up, and get ready to communicate. It looks like an oversized (30' x 30') demonic boar. On trying to talk, it charges, attacking. It charges through Zim's projected image, wasting an action. Shortly after being hit by a maximised melf's acid arrow from Grey, and being peppered by arrows from the marines, it moves and gores an Achaierai summoned from Grey, killing it with ease in one blow. Lani then summons a greater earth elemental, which enagages the beast in melee, preventing it from attacking any members of the away teams.

The beastie attacks the elemental, attacking with two gores, two claw attacks, and a bite, Despite the elementals damage reduction, it is half-killed by the beastie, and it didn't even hit all the time.

Zim, unfortunately, is finding it hard to penetrate its damage reduction.

Combat continues. It is unable to get past monsters summoned by Lani, whilst we continue to batter away at it with spells. In the end, Lani kills it with a spell. We make sure it stays dead.

On investigating the area, we find that it could have gotten to the outside of the asteroid. We find no sources of food. We also find it's lair, including dropping including straws. Rather than pulling rank and getting the marines to go through the droppings (large droppings), we summon elementals to do so for us.

We find a scroll case with various spells on it, an Iron Flask, and a staff of life.

Lani starts disecting the creature to learn about it. Lani doesn't think it's from another plane at all. It does have some fiendish elements to it, but almost as though it were a magically created creature with some ideas borrowed from demonic origin. It could reproduce.

It also appears to have multi-functional eyes, both low-light and darkvision.

The captain would like to meet the drow who is coming to visit the mongrelmen. He moves the Star Seeker to a nearby, hidden location.

We learn the beast was a Nightmare Beast.

Grey informs the mongrelmen that they should be able to sleep now.

We keep the staff of life on the ship (it doesn't require a quest to raise dead), and sell the rest of the items.

Gromdain, Kaldmont (month 12) 2, 1027

We return to the nearby green asteroid, using it as a base. Fighters fly as scouts, looking for the incoming drow.

We've made a place as a base on the green asteroid. The pegataur shaman is quite busy identifying plants, given some of the plants attack us. We also re-explore the tunnel complex we had previously cleared - it's still empty.

We biuld a dock on the green asteroid, so the Star Seeker can dock.

On this day, we get a report of what might be a ship approaching the mongrelman. It looks like a ball with many spikey things facing forward.

We fly over. By the time we get there, the vessel has docked, back end first, by all appearances. The vessel is about as big as the Falcon.

We land on the other side of the asteroid, and walk in. The mongrelwoman we spoke to earlier finds us, and leads us to her master. Zim sneaks off to look at the drow ship, and finds heavily furred mongrelmen loading up the vessel, supervised by armed drow (chain shirts, light crossbows, and shortswords).

We get introduced to the drow (or Dark Pyrondian), and have a chat. He operates from this sector, wasn't originally from Damocles, and has a number of strange ideas. He talks about grafting, finds it interesting that we're from a heavy gravity world (and from what he understand, a very dangerous place - he probably suspects we're from Mystara).

He finds it interesting that we use magics, and also finds it interesting that we are "originals", and breed with each other. He refers to the mongrelmen as mistakes, and finds them good cheap workers.

Zim, meanwhile, sneaks aboard the Dark Pyrondian vessel, and starts looking around.

He has grafts on him, such as a strength graft, which is a metal plate grafted to his forearm. Their lifeshapers create the grafts for them. He indicates they do also have people who can cast magic like us.

There are ten sectors in this belt, we are in sector 3, he is from sector 4. One direction increases in sector number, the other decreases.

He says they shaped themselves over a thousand years ago. They made themselves long lived, have special talents, and so forth. Beforehand, they were Pyrondians, similar of appearance, but with green skin, and short-lived.

He seems to be a pirate, which is what he meant from saying he is an adventurer.

He indicates he could possibly put us in touch with a life shaper.

Fezar, a lifeshaper who had probably experimented on himself a little too much, apparently wanted to take over Damocles. A war started, and then it blew up. This Fezar was apparently the inventor the magic grafts.

We agree to show the Dark Pyrondian the Falcon, from a distance, as he is curious, and we wish to see if we can learn more from him.

His ship is alive, and can live for hundreds of years.

The Dark Pyrithians (not Pyrondian) use the blood line of fiends (demons). Normal Pyrithians look like Grey, except they have green skin, and are a bit thinner.

The summary:
Pyrondians - green coloured elves.
Pyrithians - green coloured humans
Dark Pyrithians - tiefling Pyrithians
Dark Pyrondians - dark elves

There were also elephant people (Pachiderms?) on Damocles. These people look much like Ganetra, the Sindhi god of Knowledge.

We decide to leave, and agree to meet the next day, to see if we could travel together.

We review our notes, and recall that the Jotan told us that one of the creators (who did create the Dark Elves) is in the ring. He also said that to use the ring, we need to know the name of the one inside it.