If they follow the breasts and do not try to go a roundabout way, they will eventually find the old road.
As you walk along you slowly realize that the path you have been walking on is a long-abandoned stone road. Every once in a while one of the stones of the old road peeks above the grass. To your right is a low stone marker with some marking on it.
The marker reads the number of miles to the castle in roman numerals.
Within a half mile of the castle, the last battle between the goblins and the Astronomers still has its remnants.
Half-buried in the ground and grass to your right is a small skeleton, almost a child’s skeleton except for the fangs in the jaw. As you gaze around, you see, a bit further into the forest, a man-sized skeleton, still in its rusted armor, with grass and ferns growing around and through it. A bright blue flower rises through the eye sockets.
They will see several of these on the road, and, if they walk off of the road, they will see ten or twenty more.
If they search the human skeletons they will be able to find d20 silver coins marked with signs of the zodiac, each worth about a shilling in Crosspoint. There are a maximum of 28 coins on all the human skeletons out here (they had little use for coinage here in the middle of nowhere). Each player may make a Perception roll to see either Captain Cambel or Lieutenant Courlander; if a player makes their Perception roll, roll randomly to see which skeleton that player has found.
Captain Cambel’s skeleton is more richly arrayed than the others. His sword and armor are rusted away; as one of the twelve leaders of the Astronomers, his gear was once embroidered with the symbol for Capricorn. He wears an amethyst ring with a glittering Capricorn engraved beneath the gem, the band gold. The ring is worth 15 pounds in Crosspoint, 10 in Black Stag.
Another skeleton, that of Lieutenant Courlander, wears the Moonstone Ring (see back), a ring of silver strands with a soft white pearl. Courlander’s helmet, with iron wings and a Pisces symbol on the forehead, pokes above the ground. His long sword is rusted, but the hilt’s intricately woven fish designs are still visible (though fragile).
Throughout these battles, there are perhaps three to four times as many goblin skeletons as human ones.
The road rises very slightly as they move east toward the castle. It also continues on, around the castle, to the “city” of Stelopolis, up the mountains.
Related Pages
