Story So Far Part Two

After recovering from the foray into the elven tomb, the party ventured into the mountains north of Mirror Stone, picking up the trail of the undead gnolls. A trail which ended at an obscure stone tower hidden deep within the forest and built downward into the mountain.

Forging ahead, it was not long before the party caught up to the gnolls, finding the decayed beasts embroiled in a heated melee with the denizens of the strange tower, undead gnomes.

The stone walls of the tower rang as gnomes clashed with gnolls and the party battled against both. Finally the party fought to the library of the gnomish priestess, ending her un-life and the gnomish threat after a great struggle. In her writings that survived the fight, the party learned that the gnomes had uncovered a magic deep within the mountains that somehow had transformed their bodies into lifeless animations.

Not so surprising to those versed in the peculiarity of gnomes, their new un-life delighted the gnomes as they could continue the operations of their mining without need for sleep or food. Sealing themselves away from the outside world, the gnomes would have happily worked the ages away until the world ended.

The party then found a human imprisoned in the cells below the library. In return for his freedom, the man explained that he and a compatriot had come to the region after uncovering several books referring to a forbidden power buried deep within the mountain. Piecing together nearly a dozen different sources, the men believed the magic to be a stone with the power to turn life to death and giving the wielder power over both. When they found the tower and first encountered the gnomes, they immediately understood what had befallen the gnomes.

Skilled in the necromantic arts, the men raised the gnolls from a nearby ancient battlefield to provide the brute strength needed to assail the tower. Unfortunately for the party's erstwhile captive, he had second thoughts and tried to dissuade his former friend, a man named Volkar Beckett, to give up the dangerous plan and reseal the gnome’s tomb. As a cost for his turn of conscience, the man found himself left to rot away in a cell while Volkar continued along with his evil plan. Freed from his bonds, the man bid the party luck and scurried from the tower as fast as his legs could carry him.

Descending further into the tower, the party had several misadventures with a mechanical lift encountering and killing Volkar. With the necromancer's death and the realization that the stone's one great limitation was that it could not be excavated from the bedrock of the mountain, the party ended the threat of an undead invasion upon Mirror Stone village.