I managed to meet up with a couple of fellow adventurers who decided to allow me to join them on a little expedition, looking for the Stone Altar. We decided to visit the Kua-toa village in the nearby lake to see if we could get some information about the altar.
As we approached the village one of its inhabitants spotted us and swam up towards us. Rael seemed to be able to communicate with him and manged to get some conversation going with him. Unfortunately, since we couldnt all speak the Kuatoa language, he seemed to be offended and asked us to leave, So we left the water and carried on
towards where we thought the altar is. We set up camp for the night. Oogway and I did a spot of hunting for the group and managed to find a rabbit, which I happily shared with some of the group.
The rest of the night passed mostly uneventfully. We set off travelling on our way again, and came to a bridge. On the bridge there stood a strangely smiling orc, but we managed to walk on past him without any altercations.
We carried on as the weather got gradually worse. We finally came upon a Tavern and we decided to stop inside for the night.
We found out about some strange people in the woods watching the tavern.
We settled down in the tavern and began asking the proprietors and patrons about the Stone Altar.
The haflings who ran the bar seemed to be fairly forthcoming with some information about the goings on in the nearby area. The goblins just seemed to be out to make a quick buck and the orcs just seemed to be downright uninterested and hostile.
We rested for the night and set off in the morning towards the altar. Just near the forest we discovered two slain animals, like furry elephants. After checking for some tracks and taking a look around I determined that an even bigger lizard like creature killed them both and then headed off into the woods.
We reached the Stone Altar, and investigated a little bit. We found a chasm that seemed to be lined with diamond dust. We decided to try and gather some of of the dust by heading down into the cavern a bit, around 100ft or so, conscious that the chasm went much, much deeper than that.
I managed to gather a fair amount of the dust before the group called down that there was something off in the distance.
I heard some kind of scream coming from very deep down in the cavern as Rael shouted down to me. I climbed back up, gathering as much dust as I could on the way up as well.
I got out of the cavern with a good collection of the dust and we then decided to take our findings back to the town.
As we began to leave, Zilgrim decided he want to try something with the altar. As he was busy attempting to use it, some spikes came out of the altar and pierced the hand he was holding over it, apparently draining his blood into the indentation in the altar.
Once the indentation was full of blood we hear a loud noise, like the cry of a huge monster come from down in the chasm. The altar released Zilgrim and we all backed away from the chasm and the altar!
Some sort of magical portal began opening at the altar, getting larger and larger until a completed disfigured monstrosty stepped out of it and looked menacingly at Zilgrim!
The creature then began to tear our party apart. Our attacks seemed to have very little effect on it whilst every attack it made against us seemed to rend flesh and break bone.
It took down several of us with ease, but our brave cleric Peri managed to get us back up with her powerful magic. I attempted to flee the creatures wrath, but it seemed to be able to move a huge distance with its giant leaps.
It managed take Peri and Zilgrim down and then dragged them off to the chasm and to their doom!
The rest of us managed to flee from the creature, but got split up.
As we passed the area where the wooly elephants were, we saw and heard something huge in the forest. I could only imagine that it was a T-Rex given its size. We decided to try and be as stealthy as we could to avoid it and eventually got to the tavern, where the rest of the party managed to catch up to us.
We had some food and a drink for the fallen, discussed the events of the day and what we would do back at the town when we got back. We each retired for the night hoping to not have nightmares of the horror we had just witnessed.
We then travelled back to town in the morning without incident and began to make preperations to offload out spoils from our expedition and warn the settlement of the dangers that lurked near the altar.