Thistletop
An island of rock off the Lost Coast, four miles north-east of Sandpoint, screened from the mainland by the thorns of the Nettlewood. A goblin fort sits on top of it. A Thassilonian temple sits underneath it.
About an hour's ride, or three hours to row.
How we got in — both times
Not over the bridge. There is a bridge onto the stack, and the party has never used it.
They crossed by boat and went in through a sea cave, and worked inward through natural tunnels. Somewhere in the dark, on the way in, something huge and many-legged came at them. They killed it. Nobody identified it. "Giant centipede thing" is what the party settled on afterwards, and that is a description of the legs, not a species.
It cost them badly enough that they were fighting the rest of the complex on fumes.
They left the same way, and rowed home by midday.
What is actually down there
The stonework
Past the caverns the walls turn to cut stone, and Thalanadil recognised it on sight: it matches the stonework beneath the glassworks in Sandpoint. Same builders, four miles apart.
There are old runes embossed along the walls — inert, badly worn, in a long repeating pattern of about forty. Working from Brodert Quink's field guide, Thalanadil read them:
Most of them are warding runes. The single most repeated rune in the complex is the rune for GREED.
"All of these mean greed. How strange." … "This is like the temple of greed."
He copied a forty-rune section onto his own parchment, freehand, accurately and quickly, and marked where the wall ended and his guesswork began. That parchment is still in his pack, and Brodert Quink would very much like to see it.
The catacombs under Sandpoint are dedicated to wrath. This place is greed. Two different sins, four miles apart, same masonry. See Thassilon.
The shrine
Behind a pair of large stone doors carved with deformed monsters clawing their way out of pregnant women of all races:
- Stairs up to a raised platform two feet off the floor
- Braziers on the walls giving off a glowing red smoke, washing the whole room crimson
- Bas-relief carvings of monsters feasting on fleeing humans
- A black marble altar with bones scattered on it
- A ten-foot statue: a heavily pregnant, otherwise shapely woman, a kukri in each taloned hand, a long reptilian tail, bird's talons for feet, and the snarling three-eyed head of a jackal. The left kukri flickers fiery orange, the right glows cold blue
Nobody in the party has ever named her out loud. See The Enemy.
The garrison, as we met it
Hellhounds — lesser fiends, immune to fire, immune to charmed, immune to frightened, with a fire breath. At least three. Goblins, in numbers. Lyrie Akenja, who cast magic missile from the far end of a corridor and then withdrew. Orik, who surrendered. And the bugbear, who very nearly ended the party.
What we found after the battle
The Thistletop tribe is scattered and the fort is largely abandoned. The party went back through the whole place at leisure.
Nualia's rooms
Below the temple, in the Thassilonian levels. A large chest:
- 630 gold pieces
- Forty gems, roughly ten gold apiece
- A necklace of adaptation
- Lyrie Akenja's spellbook, which she had sensibly left behind rather than carry into a battle
- And, bookmarked, The Blessing of Lamashtu
The sealed door
At the very bottom of the complex.
A carving of double doors — huge, cut into a single block of stone, with a binding circle scribed around it. Where the doors ought to meet there is no gap, no seam, nothing.
"It's like a concrete sidewalk."
It is the only place in the entire complex the party cannot get into.
Set into the seal are two small slots. Not cracks. "They look like they were intentionally placed there."
This is what Nualia spent months hunting for and never found in time. There is something behind it that she believed would win her the war outright. She never got it open, and neither can we.
It needs two keys. We have neither.
The greed runewell
Another room holds the same kind of well that the thin thing came out of in the catacombs under Sandpoint.
This one is ringed, all the way round the chamber, with carvings of gold coins. Stacks and stacks of them, oversized, and not real.
Nobody has dealt with either well.
What we have still never seen
The fort on top. The party has been under Thistletop twice and has never once been inside the goblin fort itself — the chief's hall, the warrens, the lizard stables, or the bridge across.
They also never reached the middle level where Nualia's people actually lived, until after the war was over.