Addendum1

The port: "By all accounts, a thoroughly disreputable place." All they encounter try to menace or hustle them. Silt-filled canals and dusty, broke-down warrens. Warehouses, brothels, gambling. The ship they arrive on: pulled by 2 giant mantis shrimp in harnesses. beasts are mutated? Symbiotic? They have a nest for their young under the ship. The captain of the transport-hauler wants them to steal something for him. (Lantern of tunneling sight) Revealed, in the Captains cabin: The Mumphorgor: 6-7 foot beast, white fur, four black eyes, an ants mouth. Claws. (Reptilian ape) Stealthy. It mostly inhabits another dimension but can phase into ours. It phases in and out, but its ability to touch things is limited. It can lift a key at most. Semi-intelligent, semi-telepathic. Captain Slovodon of the Kerriak..(There is something very wrong with this guy) Other unsavory characters on ship: *A grisly dwarf wearing furs, carrying an axe and a warhammer (Morbund) *A bald, cadeverous looking oil-merchant carrying a small jar with a creauture in it. The whore named Butterscotch talks nonsense half the time but has real info. She has lived in B.L with Bosun. (Something no one else ever has done. Guides and smugglers dip in and out.) She describes hints of golden mammoths and face-shriekers. (The "tribe of the deep pools") She wears an unidentified bone around her neck (vertebrae) And has oily, unhealthy skin. The BL are unravelling after death of Bosun. The magic is seeping further out and may escape the island. ************ Strange phenomenon in the BL: 'One day the sun warps into 2 separate orbs with an arc connecting them. 'A dwarf that has his his lower half fused with a boulder, drags himself around. 'Giant insects/butterfies/centipedes. 'A cluster of 500-foot tall toadstools. ********** Alchemists shop: A tall tower with a wooden dome on top. The tallest tower in the city. He shows heroes the interior of the BL with his spyglass from the top. Points out Uber shambling mound, mega-toadstools, and nearby corpse tree. The dome is the only new construction in entire port. 2 small gantry cranes on either side of tower. Small packs of dogs hover nearby. Carved/painted sign over door, no name: a small child with lobster claws for hands. Item/object: Containers of Nullity. Cases which cancel out any magic properties of of objects put inside them. Size and shape of old-style lunch boxes. Alchemist tower is a center of the contraband trade in the port, just as Falcon's Egg. City fortifications: Guards are there to keep things from the BL out of the city. Occasionally mutated creatures find their way in. Between the city walls and the broken barrier, a no-mans land with warning plinths and the corpse tree. (Bandit tunnels surround it.) All trees nearby are dead but standing. As one approaches broken barrier: 1st madness/insanity check. This stops many travelelrs. * Smugglers have found a narrow tunnel through the rock wall on the north side of the canyon. Very tight, weaves in and out, and emerges past the broken section.

Addendum2-Story Arc

All the characters have had varying dreams/visions of the hell-mountain, shaped like a jagged tooth. They met the Cap and booked passage from Jun-Ree, a capital of the Noortjen, a naval port with a star-shaped fort. What they know: The port is a grim, military supply crossroads. Soldiers do the peacekeeping. Supplies are kept in a fortified, low-stone warehouse and grain in a series of silos. Heist to steal lantern: Let heroes choose method. The ancient stone columns to climb up , below stronghold in cliff. take a small skiff, pulled by a mantis-shrimp, covered with a dark, oily cloth. Climb columns? Sneak into warehouse, location of lantern unknown, fight guards. Action upon landing: post-heist. Hassling from port officials. Bribe/ thrown in stockade. Whore and contact with temple in city. (population 10,000)? Temple of Chadra. Shaped like a pyramid. Second? largest building in town. Its connection to BL magic is known. Mercenary competition: Bandits and vagabonds watch them, follow them, attempt to rob them? Whores info points to alchemist and then to corpse tree where bandits attack them. First clue, gleaned from Falcons Egg tavern: Whore is in a seedy brothel called the Blue Eel. In a quarter of the city surrounded by broken heaps of buildings. Bosun knew he was dying and went to corpse tree to deposit his arrowheads. *********** NPCs: HoKTAR and Gnome Barbarian Shaman. (Heavy hitters to round out the group) Ambiguous loyalties. Not neccesarily on the side of the heroes. Hoktar: A foreign fighter, mongoloid. Top-knot on head. From far-away land, pursuing legend and loot. Fighter on horseback. Partial heavy armor, patchwork. Helmet and leg armor, the rest is a lacquered ornate armor with stripe ornamented designs. Large plumes stick out from his helmet, peacock style. he has unusual weapons: a bladed bolo and a bow-lance: a staff with multiple crossbow fixtures. ********** Outline:. For pulling heist, Cap offers info: the name of the whore. ("The key to unlocking the whole thing") Tavern--Brothel--Temple--Alchemist. Alchemist wants the arrowheads from corpse tree. Arrowheads get them past broken barrier.

INTRO

Something strange lurks in Akana. Something broken. Something which extends it's tentacles out from there: tentacles reaching out to all the known lands, tentacles made of rumor, dreams, criminality and magic. Travellers and and traders tell of impossible shimmering beasts, colonies of the mad, powerful magically imbued objects and ancient dark secrets. Akana is a backwater, on the western edge of a large island, an old greasy port-town on a silty river mouth, flanked by rugged hills, immediately outside the grasp of the town. Its main occupation: a supply depot for the Nortjen empire, a naval power waging a war with a nearby nation, and using Akana as apit-stop. The Nortjens want nothing to do with the strange chaos in the interior of the island. They man a wall mostly in order to keep whatever is outside it sealed off. Their city faces the ocean and clings to the edge of this ruptured land. A small subculture, a trade of thieves and hustlers, regularly travels in and out of the broken lands beyond the wall, enduring this dangerous trade for the value of rare and unique magic items. ********** The heros are able to learn a fair amount from the sea captain which gives them passage. The Broken Lands have a multitude of mysterious objects laying around. Objects of cantrip-level magic are fairly common: -Stones of silence: pebbles which, when held, block all outside sound and the holder hears a strange buzz or hum, along with the apparent sound of a fire crackling or cellophane rustling. -Shimmering feathers: The feathers of iridescent birds inside the broken lands. If one is held upright in the air and waved around, it emits a candle-level glow. The artifacts and creatures become more powerful the deeper you go towards the mountain. On different continents, people dream and hallucinate and have visions of the mountain, all with a sense of foreboding or doom. Rumors of things inside the Broken Lands: creatures which have chameleon abilities, phasing/invisibility techniques, and 'poisoned' areas, which if someone walks through them, turn their bones to jelly. With a spy-glass from the tallest tower in the port, one can see a speck in the far distance that quivers alarmingly: the Uber-Shambling Mound. The sea captain seperrates what is known from rumor and gives them tips, though he is in thrall to the land's magic. He tells them to find the woman Butterscotch. And he tells them the name of the tavern where all the illicit business is contracted: The Falcon's Egg. A large carved sign of a bird with wings spread sits over the door, painted brilliantly but covered in dust. The name is written in the languages of three races.