Amongst the squat, broad, and thickly-forested hills north and east of Hawksong, between the savage barrier of the cold Orcwilds and the lush plenty of the elves’ shrinking Silver Realm, there is a land called The Steelwood by those who live there. For centuries, it has been a place of constant (if often low-level and intermittent) conflict. Elf and Man, Man and Orc, Orc and Elf, all have fought and shed blood there, and their fallen swords, shields, and spears litter the land and give it its name. Each of them claims a birthright to this inauspicious area. Eash of them claims that their ancestors staked their claim first, before the others arrived.
But if you ask the Dwarves, they are all wrong.
Your party—The Monstrous Regiment—came to The Steelwood to earn a cut of a lucrative dwarven corporate contract. The contract was initially taken by another adventuring outfit calling themselves ‘The Delvers’, whom you met after an unexpected team-up hunting lake monsters, and whose technical focus would complement your party’s particular skillset: goblin grit, the Feycraft of a faun you found, a shrewdness born of a difficult and colourful life, and a certain occult secret up your sleeve. The Steelwood Expedition’s purpose: to find and explore the ruins of a buried pyramid among the hills, a mysterious megastructure belonging to the last of the long-defunct dwarven. After a brief break detour to pick up some local orc muscle by making a deal with local orc horde, you journeyed into the hills to survey for some potentially quite valuable ruins.
What you found was far greater, and much stranger, than any archaeological discovery you could have anticipated.
The pyramid had been plundered and illicitly inhabited by The Ettercap, a spider-faced fairy defector from the Chaotic Good gods of elvenkind. Deep within the hidden hill-fort, the disturbed demigod had laid claim to ancient wonders of a technology that predated even the dwarven race—belonging to a blue-green breed of GOBLIN, of all things—and turned the transformative power of the great bio-magical forge at its centre to a terrible purpose. Using the same processes which (as you discovered) had been used to give ancient goblins new soul and substance, and to create the races of Dwarf, Gnome, and Halfling, she has made purple-skinned and bug-eyed ‘foundlings’ from kidnapped kids taken from all over the Steelwood.
One half of your party was kidnapped, and nearly suffered the very same fate.
