Tipos de semilleros de investigación

Many of the souls of the thousands of orcs that burned to death at Nealyngard lin- gered on as the Lost, haunting the plain of burned forest around the jagged rocks and the sunken fortress. This area has become another region lost to the elves, who can afford neither the troops nor the magic necessary to destroy the vile ghosts. The Shadow’s minions, how- ever, relish Nealyngard as a safe haven and resupply point along the river; the ghosts make effective guards, thanks to the influence of legates and the necromancers of the kuras-

atch udareen.

Lifetaker Ghost, Male Orc Ghost Ftr 3: CR 5; Medium Undead (incorporeal); HD

3d12; hp 19; Init +0; Spd 30 ft. (6 squares); AC 12, touch 12, flatfooted 11; Base Atk +3; Grp +7; Atk +7 melee (1d6 + 1d6 fire, flam- ing touch); SA flaming touch*, horrific appearance; SQ undead, orc traits, rejuvena- tion, turn resistance +4; AL CE; SV Fort +3, Ref +2, Will +1; Str 18, Dex 12, Con —, Int 8, Wis 10, Cha 12.

*Flaming Touch (Su): Unlike the

incorporeal touch of a normal ghost, the touch attack of a Lifetaker ghost carries with it deadly hell flames that burn away the life and flesh of living victims, dealing 1d6 points of damage and an additional 1d6 points of fire damage.

Skills: Climb –2, Hide +9, Intimidate

+3, Jump –2, Listen +8, Search +7, Spot +8, Survival +2.

Feats: Power Attack, Cleave, Weapon

Focus (touch).

Languages: Black Tongue, Old Dwarven

Pidgin, High Elven Pidgin, Orcish.

Appearance and Personality: The

Lifetaker ghosts appear as tough, grizzled orcs who perished in awful flames, their skin blackened and charred and their scale armor reduced to a shell of molten iron that flows over their ruined bodies as they clutch red-hot vardatches. Boiling eyes glow orange in ash- smeared sockets, flaring madly when roused to rage by the presence of humans or fey. Their commander, Zokeer (male orc ghost, ftr9) leads them even in death, assisted by Hagrur (male orc ghost, cha7), a shaman with a taste for fire magics.

A small band of elite soldiers and magi- cians crept towards Nealyngard while the rest of the Lifetakers retired several miles away, hoping to stay out of the destruction to come. When the Holocaust Sphere was triggered, a wave of heat erupted from it, vaporizing the forward guard of orcs at once and igniting miles of forest. The true, invisible-hot flames of the Sphere soon emerged, liquefying stone and turning elves to fine ash instantly as it began to burn the bridge. But even as the fortress tumbled into the river in burning pieces, the secondary fires it ignited were whipped into a fiery vortex, a tornado of destruction that swallowed an area of forest six miles across, immolating the entire Lifetaker Legion in one incendiary swoop.

Though Nealyngard was unequivocally destroyed, Jahzir was not fully pleased with the result. He had lost many of his best troops and henchmen in the firestorm, and worse, shards of the Holocaust Sphere fell into the river, making it boil furiously for two years after the fall of Nealyngard, thus rendering travel upriver impossible and giving the elves a chance to build their defenses along the next stretch of river. The Shadow army’s first attempt to use fire as a strategic weapon proved to be costly and wasteful, and they were discouraged from attempting it again for a number of years. There were also mutter- ings that the Shadow’s Sorcerer had purpose- fully provided Jahzir with a double-edged blade, and laughed when the Sword of the Shadow was made to look foolish.

38 LA, Late Spring: The Fall of

Kassundaja. The temple-fortress of

Kassundaja sat atop a tall, ochre mesa in the Aruun , a retreat for the Danisil where the study of astrological techniques learned from the Sarcosans was conducted. Kassundaja was home to nearly 500 scholars, their fami- lies and children. The fortress was also home to an academy for defenders, warriors who learned an unarmed version of the Danisil dual-sepi fighting style. This fortress was one of the few jungle elf settlements visible from the air by dragons and astirax-possessed birds, so had been long regarded as one of the few potential targets in the Aruun.

At the beginning of the war season in the year 38 LA, several thousand orcs, accom- panied by Crooked Mother Tribe sappers, siege-trained war boro, and a company of ogre laborers broke through the jungle to sur- round Kassundaja and began to dig in. The mesa-top fortress was unusual for a Danisil settlement in that it had no vine or branch bridges to provide escape routes; the only

ways in were steep stone steps cut into the cliff faces. The elves were well and truly trapped, but luckily had fair reserves of food they could cultivate with their natu- ral magic and agricultural skills.

As the year wore on, the Shadow’s forces began to suffer the effects of the Aruun’s indignation: venomous insects and reptiles swarmed over them day and night, biting and stinging; poisonous molds grew in supply stores; the weather grew hotter and wetter all year as an unseasonable warm spell extended into autumn. In addi- tion, jungle elven skirmishers harried the camps con- stantly, veteran demon-hunters turning their blades against the orcs. Were it not for the natural toughness and stubbornness of orcs, the siege may have disinte- grated in these adverse conditions. Although they suf- fered constant misery, the orcs’ hatred of the fey and natural hardiness allowed them to endure the boredom, assassination attempts, and sickness. The human leg- ates, on the other hand, soon learned to use their spells to purify everything they ate, drank, touched, sat on, brushed against, or walked on. Those that didn’t died rapid and painful deaths, their faces bloating and turning purple as they kicked out their dying moments on the damp earth.

It was a hard time for the elves, too; food began to run short despite their precautions, and the orcs attacked frequently and savagely, often with heavily armed and armored creatures that proved deadly to the few defend- ers that remained. As the year began to close, the Danisil

realized that they would be overrun in the next assault; they had grown too short of warriors and too weak to endure any longer.

One evening, the orcs clambered up the mesa and stormed Kassundaja. They found it undefended, the streets covered with the bodies of men, women, and children, dead apparently by their own hands. Overcome by victory, the orcs fell on them and began to feast on the dead. As the bloody meal continued, the orcs began to grow sick. The legates realized that they had been poisoned; the Danisil had taken yenthril, a particularly virulent substance drawn from the root-sap of certain trees in a mass suicide. Orcs began to drop dead all around; the legates could not call on enough blessings to save many of them from the poison. Within hours, the humans, who had of course not partaken of the raw, brutal meal, began to fall ill as well. Unbeknownst to them, a side effect of yenthril was to speed the decom- position of bodies, and the hundreds upon hundreds of festering corpses were all laced with plague seeds, mak- ing them a perfect breeding ground for tropical fevers. The humans were all but wiped out in the epidemic swirl that followed; only one in 10 was well enough to flee, and they were picked off at leisure by the vengeful Danisil in the jungle. Kassundaja remains a place haunt- ed by Fell and plague demons to this day; to the elves it is a tragic example of defiance and spite that they pray to their forest spirits will never need to be reenacted.

Runners. As the orcish hordes prowled ever deeper into

the gloom of Erethor, Jahzir began to search for a new way to expedite communications with the ever more distant commanders. In the end, he settled on gathering a large band of halfling slaves and formed them into a messenger corps. Holding their kin hostage and bespell- ing them not to deliver their messages to the elves and escape, several hundred halflings were forcibly recruit- ed into the Ashfoot Runners. They bore the brand of a black foot on their foreheads and on armbands to pre- vent them from being devoured or slain out of hand by the orcish patrols they needed to pass. The Shadow’s messenger corps has proved mostly effective; they are trained to run long and fast, overcoming their naturally small stride through a loping gait. Native survival skills keep them alive in the blackened fields they must tra- verse.

An unexpected consequence of the Ashfoot Runners is that they have made it easier for halfling resistance agents to move around the Shadow-occupied parts of the forest. Wearing the brand of the Runners, combined with a lot of fast talking, is often enough to gain access to heavily guarded camps.

60 LA, Midsummer: The Arc of Cursed Ash.

Northwest of the Foul Bog of Eris Aman, a war band of orcs set a major fire to add to the confusion and terror of their attack against an elven redoubt in the Veradeen, counting on the winds to carry the flames and smoke towards the elves. As the fire burned, though, it came up against a swathe of forest packed with snow drifts pre- pared by the elves, and the blaze could not spread closer to the elven base. The fire began to turn and burn the way it had come, washing over the ranks of the Shadow’s soldiers as they crept through the woods. A thousand orcs died in the blaze, with more than twice that number and countless goblins killed and driven back when the flames reached the camps. More than 600 square miles of old growth blackpine forest was reduced to a sprawling field of ash, and for more than a month small fires wreaked havoc in the surrounding woods as hot cinders were stirred out of the devastation by gusts of wind.

72 LA, Early Autumn: Taming the Holocaust.

Orcish fire-raisers set a blaze upriver from Eisin, burn- ing several square miles of light forest. Elven raiders, deprived of cover and sustenance, were unable to attack the orcs’ forward observation posts for most of the sea- son. The orcs were pleased by the result, and more small fires were set along the sides of the river, keeping guer- rillas at bay and allowing troop-laden barges to move farther upstream unmolested. The camps and garrisons of Eisin crept forward by several miles, taking advan- tage of the lull in fighting.

74 LA, Late Summer: Siege of Fire. Before

besieging an isolated tree-turret, an Eisin war band used trebuchets to throw burning brands into the dry forests behind the fortification. Surrounded by a curtain of flames, the elves were easily driven out of the tree-turret and butchered, unable to trigger the ambushes, traps,

and deceptions they normally relied on to hold off supe- rior numbers. Nearly one hundred elves were killed, and they claimed less than a score of orcish lives in the pro- cess.

75 LA, Early Spring: The Thundering Hills. As

the orc and goblins hordes crept from their winter lairs and began to move south, Erunsil packs that had win- tered in the terrible cold of the highest peaks unleashed the fury of the mountains on their despised enemies. Explosions of eldritch energy, placed where the snows were the thickest, caused the great sheets of snow and ice to cascade down the mountains in an irresistible tide of white death. The mountains thundered as the tons of snow buried the passes, killing countless thousands and sealing the passes for months.

91, Midsummer: Rise of Grial the Fey-Killer.

Deep in the forest southeast of Althorin, an elven com- pany came across two hosts of orcs locked in battle. After watching for a time, the elven commander decided to attack, taking advantage of his foes’ distraction and conflict to strike decisively and eliminate them all. As soon as the elves emerged from the woods, the orcish commander bellowed a command . . . and to the elves’ horror, the battling groups reformed into one army, dis- ciplined and ready to meet their attack. The orcs crashed into the scrambling elven warriors, wiping out several hundred elves in one fell swoop. Grial the Fey-Killer had arrived and was ready to take command at Jahzir’s pleasure.

93 LA, Late Winter: Designs in the Shadow. As

the year drew to a close, an elven warrior named Mellisen was captured shortly before the winter solstice and eventually succumbed to the agonizing tortures inflicted upon him by the Harrowers. Through bloody lips, he spoke of his duty to defend the nexus of Lea’tian. The legates learned that Aradil was enchanting a power- ful artifact there, a White Mirror, an artifact designed to stop the drain on the life of Eredane by the Shadow’s network of coriths.

On the authority of Sunulael, the legates brought this information to Grial, commanding him to take Lea’tian and stop the ritual. Though angered by this interference, the general had no choice but to obey and began to formulate his strategy. In the depths of winter, troops began to flood the area around the nexus, using the elves’ own guerrilla tactics against them as best they could. This forced the mobilization of an elven army camped to the north, and the entire region devolved into long-running skirmishes between the two groups. The elven commanders were nervous; spies told them that the Fey-Killer himself was orchestrating this campaign, and they believed the implicit bluff that Grial’s plan was to tie them down in the region while he moved else- where. In the dying days of the year, they saw a large band of regular troops advancing toward them and the elves withdrew reflexively, fearing the trap was closing. Grial’s army swiftly took control of the area and fought off all approaches from the elves.

Grial’s planning paid off. As the elven forces in the area were being held at bay, a horde of ogres, trolls, and orcs overran the nearly undefended shrine. The monks and elven warriors of the temple fought desperately but were butchered to a man, and in the chaos, the legates sent their astiraxes into the depths of the shrine to ravage the monks who were performing the ritual. The half-com- pleted White Mirror was broken and the pieces seized by the Shadow. Some were carried off to Theros Obsidia, others into the far north. Aradil fell into a period of torpor lasting nearly half the year after this defeat, depriving the elves of her essential advice and support.

99 LA: Under Grial’s brilliant leadership, the

front lines of the war have advanced a hundred miles into the elven woods, a gain in 10 years nearly as large as all the battles of the previous 90. Orcish bootmarks dent the ashen earth in a vast swathe of destruction all along the forest’s perimeter. Nothing grows, and the only groves are those of crucified elves captured by Grial’s forces, alongside humans and orcs found guilty of cowardice. Many of these victims have become Fell, and their wails are a constant background noise to the war ballads of the orcs as they march on patrol. The more recently captured areas of the occupied zone are less torn by dire spells than the earlier regions. They are filled with flattened tree stumps and battlements manned by grim-eyed warriors, a testament to the Fey-Killer’s efficiency and the speed of his conquests, rather than any lesser quality of savagery on his part.