The Dream

If by this stage of the game the players have made little headway in their investigations they will each receive the same dream, which is divinely inspired.

The characters will endure a restless night, tossing and turning in their beds, and despite the cool night air, sweating profusely.

The dream will come upon them thusly

A brazen sun burns down out of a vault of the deepest blue, the heat is a physical thing which weighs you down, and saps the energy from your every movement. In the harbour, the waves slap against the hulls of reed and wooden planked boats, over which half naked dark skinned men, clad only in brief white kilts, clamber. Gulls wheel above the docks, adding their raucous cries to the chants of the seamen, the babble of the merchants and the fishwives. And everywhere are the priests, striding serenely aloof from the common throng which parts so as to not impede their progress.

The scene shifts, and you realise that you are dreaming as you find yourself in a high stone chamber, the vaulted ceiling held aloft by crude stone columns. The heat here is as stifling as outside, the air dead. Guards armed with simple copper headed spears line the walls and ahead you see a simple stone dais. A golden throne heaped high with silken cushions is located centrally upon the dais, and atop the mound of cushions reclines a young woman of phenomenal beauty. At her feet, sit four identical women who could twins of the one on the throne, who slowly turns her head to face you.

End Game

Returning to Menadoc, the party will find the village in a state of agitation. An angry, frightened crowd has gathered in the village square, armed with an improvised array of weapons.

As the party enters the square they will feel faint vibration. Villagers exchange surprised glances, the mayor is speaking, his words lost.

Surprise turns to agitation, and a murmur sweeps the crowd as men and women nervously look around seeking out the source of the strange vibration.

Then the ground trembles violently and with an enormous shuddering crash one of the houses bordering the square explodes in a shower of dust and broken mortar. A massive purple worm rises high above the cloud of debris, writhes and falls back to earth with a ground shaking thump.

Around you, one by one, the houses begin to explode in puffs of dust and falling masonry. In the village square the cobblestones begin to subside, beneath the feet of the shrieking townsfolk, sinking slowly at first as the crowd flees in terrified panic, and then faster and faster. Then the ground opens up and where the square once was, yawns a cavernous pit into which the debris slides, plummeting down in an avalanche of dust and falling stone.

Then as the billowing clouds of dust begin to settle you see a mass of forms scurrying antlike about the floor of the pit. And as you watch, they begin to swarm up the jagged walls. Then as the first wave of writhing figures surges clear of the roiling eddies of dust, you realise that you are watching an army of skeletons on the move. The missing inhabitants of the Halls of the dead have been found.

DM: run the battle as you see fit. Make it quite clear to the players that they face overwhelming numbers (literally 1000’s of skeletons). Should the party refuse to retreat they will be eventually overrun by superior numbers. Should their resistance prove more successful than expected then the barrow warriors leading the attack will eventually target them.

Epilogue

As a final macabre joke, Zytharis will send a barrow warrior to cut down the party just as they believe that they’ve finally escaped her bony embrace

All day the road has been clogged by a mass of refugee’s streaming away from Menadoc which now lies many miles behind

Only a pillar of smoke remains to mark its funeral pyre.

At nightfall, exhausted you make camp, surrounded by the campfires, the wails of screaming children, and the subdued conversation of the refugee’s.

Sitting around the fire, drained by the events of the past day, you stare into the dancing tongues of yellow and green flame. A woman carrying a baby wrapped in swaddling crosses to your campsite from an adjoining campfire, she stands silently in the circle of flickering light, and as you look to her curiously she tosses the baby into the flames.

With an explosions of sparks, the baby tumbles into the embers, and as you gasp, the loose bundle of swaddling clothes falls away and within you see a child’s rag doll, the flames already licking at its straw stuffing. The woman raises her hand, sweeping back the hood of her robe, revealing the grinning skeletal face within, and then as chorus of screams erupt around you, the skeletal figure casts back its robes and with a rasp draws a jagged blades that gleams with an cold inner ice white light.

Barrow Warrior

AC 4 HD 6 HP 30

+1 long sword

The destruction of the barrow warrior marks the end of the parties tribulations, and ahead the road lies clear, to wherever fate or destiny will bear them.